Enlightenment is literally en-light-enment,
the condition of being lit up, or illumined.
-Georg Feuerstein

To become illuminated, to achieve enlightenment,
means to become aware of the source of light.
-David Coxhead and Susan Hiller

Enlightenment is characterized
by the pure inner light.
-Yogavasistha

To be enlightened is to experience the sacred in the present moment 

and in the material and immaterial universe.

All of life becomes suffused with divinity, deep unity and an immense peace.

-Harriet Mohr

Enlightenment can only be
're-integration in Intemporality'.
-Ramesh Balsekar

Enlightenment is the awakening to our primal harmony
or, in another mystical language,
to our rootedness in the Divine.
-Les Hixon

Fundamentally enlightenment
is identifying your true self.
-Ken Wilber

When all of your identity is residing in what you really are -
that's enlightenment.
-Steven Gray, "Adyashanti"

True enlightenment is nothing
but the nature of one's own self being fully realized.
-Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama

Enlightenment is the realization of one's own nature
as ultimate reality.
-Judith Blackstone

Enlightenment is nothing more
than the complete absence of resistance to what is.
End of story.
-Steven Gray, "Adyashanti"

Enlightenment is the absolute acceptance of Reality.

-John Diamond

Enlightenment is simply your natural state
of felt oneness with Being.
-Eckhart Tolle

To be enlightened is to become saturated

in the reality of your true nature.

-Harriet Mohr

Enlightenment is, in the end,
nothing more than the natural state of being.
-Steven Gray, "Adyashanti"

Enlightenment cannot be according to any system.
It has to resolve and clarify your own situation.
The realization must satisfy and fulfill your own heart,
not the standards of some system.
The liberation must be of you, of you personally...
The quest does not bring about improvement or perfection.
It brings about a maturity, a humanity and a wisdom.
-A. H. Almaas

Enlightenment of awakening 

is not the creation of a new state of affairs

but the recognition of what already is.

-Alan Watts

Enlightenment is just knowing what is.
That is called sahaja, which means "natural";
it means just seeing clearly.
-Dayananda Saraswati

Enlightenment - the ability to see clearly,
perceive reality, be authentic and be fully human.
-Gilles Marin

Enlightenment is the natural condition of life
after you strip the unnatural, heavy and dark conditions away.
-Ron Smotherman

The only thing preventing enlightenment

is searching for it.

-Zen Saying

Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light
but making the darkness conscious.
-Carl Jung

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

Enlightenment pertains to the essence
and is beyond forms and images of any kind.
-James Davis

The Wisdom of Enlightenment is inherent in every one of us.
It is because of the delusion under which our mind works
that we fail to realize it ourselves,
and that we have to seek the advice and the guidance of enlightened ones.
-Hui-Neng

There is no difference
between an enlightened man and an ignorant one.
What makes the difference,
is that the one realizes it,
while the other is kept in ignorance of it.
-Hui-Neng

God is your very being.
So the first thing is,
don't think about enlightenment as a goal.
-Chandra Mohan Jain, "Osho"

Realization consists only in getting rid of the false idea
that one is not realized.
It is not anything new to be acquired.
-Ramana Maharshi

It is a kind of mystery that for people
who have no experience of enlightenment,
enlightenment is something wonderful.
But if they attain it, it is nothing.
But yet it is nothing. Do you understand?
For a mother with children,
having children is nothing special.
-D. T. Suzuki

Enlightenment is not an attainment;
it is a realization.
And when you wake up,
everything changes and nothing changes.
If a blind man realizes that he can see,
has the world changed?
-Dan Millman

Enlightenment is being awake in the nowness.
-Chogyam Trungpa

What is enlightenment other than an absolute awareness of the present?

We experience this state in somewhat more mundane form

during moments of play and creativity, but at the most subtle levels,

it represents nothing less than an awakening 

to the very foundation of out true nature, 

to be present in the present moment.

-Ray Grasse

Enlightenment is...to snap out of the movie of life.
To wake up, to shake it off.
You are, and always have been, at the movies,
as the Witness.
-Ken Wilber

Enlightenment is finding that there is nothing to find.
Enlightenment is to come to know that there is nowhere to go.
-Chandra Mohan Jain, "Osho"

There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Whatever is happening,

this is the path to enlightenment.

-Pema Chodron

Before enlightenment,
chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment,
chop wood, carry water.
-Zen Saying

Before enlightenment,
mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.
With enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains
and rivers are no longer rivers.
After enlightenment, mountains are again mountains
and rivers are again rivers.
-Zen Saying

Its [the tree of Enlightenment's] fruit is wisdom
although absolute in its essence,
is always at home in the relative situation in which it finds itself.
-Hugh L'Anson Fausset

Enlightenment is the journey
back from the head to the heart.
-Ravi Shankar

Enlightenment is not intellectual conviction
(that would be philosophy),
but immediate experience.
-Hans-Ulrich Rieker

Enlightenment is a process of detachment.
-Sivananda Radha

Enlightenment is not a higher state of mind.
It is not a glorified state of the inward or subjective being.
Enlightenment is a bodily Condition.
It is a matter of the transcendence of mind,
all inwardness, and all illusions of independent existence.
It is a matter of relationship, not inwardness.
It is a matter of the conversion of attention from exclusive fascination
with the objects, states, desires, and mental reflectiveness
of the subjective disposition.
It is a matter of the dissolution of attention
in the Transcendental Reality, the Living God.
Enlightenment is the most subtle, or tacit, unspeakable understanding.
On its basis, all kinds of radiant transformations may develop
but the Realization itself is so tacit, so simple,

so direct, so obvious, so fundamental,
that it is not identified with any phenomenon or experience or knowledge.
-Franklin Jones

The ultimate goal of spiritual seeking
is beyond these different levels of mental existence.
The ultimate goal is integration with ultimate reality,
with the purely spiritual dimension of existence,
which is nirvana, the state of absolute enlightenment.
-Haridas Chaudhuri

Enlightenment is the shattering
of all mental constructs about existence,
including the notions of voidness and chaos
or fulfillment and harmony.
-Georg Feuerstein

Enlightenment occurs when we awaken to the truth
that everything is higher consciousness, or Spirit.
This realization, however, is not a mere intellectual exercise.
Rather, it is a bodily and mental transformation
that shatters all our intellectual presumptions about it.
It sweeps us up and grasps and transfigures our entire body-mind.
What gets blown to pieces is the idea
that we are different from that Reality -
that we are an I, an ego, a finite personality.
In our realization of higher consciousness,
we do not merely conceive it, or speculate about it, or even intuit it.
We are it. Or to put it different, it is all there is.
-Georg Feuerstein

You may have expected that enlightenment would come ZAP!
instantaneous and permanent.
This is unlikely.
After the first "ah ha" experience,
it can be thought of as the thinning of a layer of clouds.
-Richard Alpert, "Ram Dass"

There are very few human beings who receive the truth,
complete and staggering, by instantaneous illuminations.
Most of them conquer it fragment by fragment
on a small scale, by successive developments,
cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
-Anais Nin

Enlightenment must come little by little -
otherwise it would overwhelm.
-Idries Shah

Make enlightenment your standard,

and don't feel bad if it is slow in coming.

-Yuanwu

The Pilgrim's Progress to the Celestial City
is man's circuitous journey towards enlightenment,
the spiral of unfolding consciousness
in which similar situations recur on successive windings.
-Jill Purce

If you desire enlightenment, you are wise enough to know
that under conditions of desire enlightenment cannot be attained.
It cannot be "attained" in any case; it can only occur.
-Sam Reifler

Water heats gradually and boils suddenly.
Awakening cannot be forced
but it can be encouraged.
-Zen Saying

Enlightenment cannot be attained, nor forced.
It can only happen.
-Nisargadatta

Enlightenment is not a step by step process but a sudden leap.
The movement from one state of consciousness to another
seems frequently to be characterized by two primary factors,
one of acute tension and spiritual anguish
followed by a sudden and often dramatic release
or surrender of the personality to a higher aspect of consciousness.
-David Tansley

To gain enlightenment, you must want it
as much as man whose head is held under water wants air.
-Zen Saying

Paths to enlightenment:
The Long Path - Ego seeks perfection (future)
The Short Path - Soul invokes grace (now).
-Paul Brunton

Psychologically speaking,
the idea of the gradual approach to enlightenment
is a clever device to keep the ego enthoned as long as possible.
-Georg Feuerstein

'Sudden Enlightenment' means precisely the immediate apperception
of all that in fact we are.
'Enlightenment' is 'sudden' only because it is not in 'time'
(subject to sequential duration).
It is reintegration in in temporality.
-Wei Wu Wei

Enlightenment is always sudden
in the sense that's it's an intuitive understanding.
It's not something that you can think out.
It comes out of a silent mind, an intuitive, sudden, wordless understanding.
But that kind of intuitive understanding doesn't happen by accident.
There's a certain balance of mind which has been cultivated
making that sudden understanding possible.
-Joseph Goldstein

What sudden enlightenment indicates
is the mending of the dichotomy of the whole-mind
whereby the operation of the split-mind no longer prevails.
-Ramesh Balsekar

For enlightenment to happen
the perceiver must turn right around
and wake up to the fact he is face to face
with his own nature - That He Is It.
-Ramesh S. Balsekar

Enlightenment, for a wave in the ocean,
is the moment the wave realizes it is water.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Enlightenment is the moment when a human soul realizes
he is a drop of fire, a drop in the ocean of all pervading love.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Full enlightenment is not merely a momentary loss of self
but a permanent identity shift.
-Georg Feuerstein

While enlightenment changes our self-image (or self-identity)
and the psychological structures underpinning it,
it does not abolish or even transmute all the structures.
-Georg Feuerstein

Enlightenment does away with the ego.
It consists in the transcendence of ego-habit,
that particular sense of being somehow identical with the body-mind.
-Georg Feuerstein

The enlightened man emerges
from this overwhelming experience a new person.
A transformation of his character,
behavior and hierarchy of values has occurred.
A new life style arises without his volition,
astounding no one so much as the person to whom it happens.
His ego has mysteriously diminished.
He experiences a selflessness
of which he did not know himself capable,
a certitude for which he has longed,
a love of the human race that astounds him,
harmony with the universe
that his rational mind had assured him was impossible,
and a joy unlike any other.
-Clair Myers Owens

Enlightenment is to be restored to Divine humor,
to realize that nothing is necessary.
-Franklin Jones

Since I have received enlightenment
in the infinite wonders of truth
I have always been cheerful and laughing.
-Hung Chou

The personality of an enlightened being
can be expected to sparkle with qualities
that in the ordinary person would be deemed great moral virtues.
-Georg Feuerstein

When enlightened,
he becomes what he essentially is,
namely, a self-conscious center of Being -
that is to say, a spontaneously joyful medium of manifestation
of such supreme values as peace, love, justice and creativity.
-Haridas Chaudhuri

After self-realization
any behaviors or actions expressed through the body of a sage
are spontaneous and totally unconditioned.
-Nisargadatta

Enlightenment is the shifting of the center of your consciousness
from limited soul to unlimited spirit.
-J. Donald Walters, "Kriyananda"

The difference between enlightened and unenlightened beings

is that an enlightened being lives in the presence.

-J. Z. Knight, "Ramtha"

Enlightenment is the final victory
of the internal over the external aspects of life.
-Manly Hall

Enlightenment is the highest good.
Once you have it,
nobody can take it away from you.
-Siddharameshwar

Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it;

we have merely discovered it.

-Chogyam Trungpa

Unity is divinity;
purity is enlightenment.
-Sai Baba

To be enlightened
is to be intimate with all things.
-Dogen

He is enlightened, liberated
who sees all things are One -
Unseparated.
-Angelus Silesius

By definition, the enlightened being is undivided and whole.
he or she is the same One 

that is the true nature of everyone and everything.
-Georg Feuerstein

To the enlightened man...
whose consciousness embraces the universe,
to him the universe becomes his "body."
-Lama Govinda

If you are enlightened,
you are not free as some people say.
but you are freedom itself.
Not like bird in the sky,
but like the sky itself.
-Walter A. Keers

Full enlightenment, complete and all-illuminating enlightenment, 

is God-realization.

-Sri Chinmoy