Best enlightenment & literature Quotes

“What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.”

Ifs Thinking Has Beens Art Literature Enlightenment Art Is Decided Regard Entertainment Decades Transcendent

Author:Richard Condon

“Everybody wants to get enlightened but nobody wants to change.”

Want Literature Change Enlightenment Enlightened

Author:Andrew Cohen

“So the most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner's mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, "I know what Zen is," or "I have attained enlightenment." This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginner's mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.”

“I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.”

Giving Book Reading Literature Judging Enlightenment Awards Steady Nonfiction Amusement Assignments

Author:Joyce Carol Oates

“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”

Humans Made Literature Human Beings Existence Path Clear Enlightenment Planning Aspiration

Book:Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad (Including His Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays: Unforgettable Tales like Heart of Darkness, Point of Honor, Falk, Secret Sharer, The Return & Freya of Seven Isles

Source: Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad (Including His Memoirs, Letters & Critical Essays: Unforgettable Tales like Heart of Darkness, Point of Honor, Falk, Secret Sharer, The Return & Freya of Seven Isles

“The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.”

Enough Spirit Literature Strong Nations United Enlightenment League Nationalism Aggressive Idealism United Nations Strong Enough Charter Dynamism League Of Nations

Book:The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

Source: The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

“Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.”

Needs Reason Age Political Literature Justice Enlightenment Claims Birthday New Age Political Systems Search For Truth Age Of Enlightenment

Author:Friedrich Durrenmatt

“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

Source: For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

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Enlightenment Quotes