The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

Between our birth and death we may touch understanding, As a moth brushes a window with its wing.

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.

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.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

It is a great blessing to have light in our lives - a light that helps us see things as they really are, light that illuminates our understanding, light we can follow with confidence and perfect trust.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

The Enlightenment diamond-shaped society, with a huge, prosperous, socially-mobile, empowered middle class, is by far the most productive and creative system the world has ever seen.

The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.

As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have more and more revolted against the theological dogmas that contradict common sense and wound the tenderest sensibilities of the soul.

Although born in a prosperous realm, we did not believe that its boundaries should limit our knowledge, and that the lore of the East should alone enlighten us.

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

A philosophy of freedom must set out from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience of thinking that a human being discovers his own self, finds his bearings as an independent personality.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country.'

The real business of life is trying to understand each other.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

Leibniz dedicated his life to efforts to educate people to understand that true happiness is found by locating their identity in benefitting mankind and their posterity.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

In youth we learn; in age we understand.

Understanding is a three-edged sword. Your side, my side, and the truth.

A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

It is proper that noble spirits, equipped with truth and enlightened with the Divine intelligence, should arm themselves against dense ignorance by climbing up to the high rock and tower of contemplation.

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.

The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint, and he understands ours, then we can sit down and work out our differences.

For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

The introduction of many minds into many fields of learning along a broad spectrum keeps alive questions about the accessibility, if not the unity, of knowledge.

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.

A man is given the choice between loving women and understanding them.