Famous quotes containing the word enlightened:
“Civilization has not ever been the brother of equality. Freedom was born among the wild eyries in the mountains; and barbarous tribes have sheltered under her wings, when the enlightened people of the plain have nestled under different pinions.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men’s deeds and not our thoughts. What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)