Quotes about Illumination

The deepest need of our darkness is to comprehend the light which shines in the midst of it.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Movies can be instruments of enlightenment.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

The larger the searchlight, the larger the searchlight of the unknown.

The life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.

To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!

If a ray of light falls into a pigsty, it is the ray that shows us the muck and it is the ray that is offensive.

How does light enter a house? If the windows are open. How does light enter a human? If the door of love is open.

Statistics are like a drunk with a lampost: used more for support than illumination.