Ramakrishna Quotes

Shri Ramakrishna use to say, "As Long as I Live, so long do I learn". That man or that society which has nothing to learn is already in the jaws of death.

Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing.

You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? Because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.

One man may read the Bhagavata by the light of a lamp, and another may commit a forgery by that very light; but the lamp is unaffected. The sun sheds its light on the wicked as well as on the virtuous.

As long as I live, so long do I learn.

God is in all men, but all men are not in God; that is why we suffer.

The Man who works for others, without any selfish motive, really does good to himself.

Do all your duties, but keep your mind on God. Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,p.81

You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.

The winds of God's grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sails.

Common men talk bagfuls of religion but do not practise even a grain of it. The wise man speaks a little, even though his whole life is religion expressed in action.

Different creeds are but different paths to reach the same God.

If you must be mad, be it not for the things of the world. Be mad with the love of God.

Finish the few duties you have at hand, and then you will have peace.

Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.

Bondage and Liberation are of the mind alone.

God is everywhere but He is most manifest in man. So serve man as God. That is as good as worshipping God.

What Brahman is cannot be described. All things in the world — the Vedas, the Puranas, the Tantras, the six systems of philosophy — have been defiled, like food that has been touched by the tongue, for they have been read or uttered by the tongue. Only one thing has not been defiled in this way, and that is Brahman. No one has ever been able to say what Brahman is.

The goal of life is not the earning of money, but the service of God.p.114

Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say 'I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me' free you shall be.

As Long As I Live, So Long Do I Learn

The goal of human life," says Ramakrishna, "is to meet God face to face." But the magic is this: if we look deeply into the face of all created things, we will find God. Therefore, savor the world, the body. Open it, explore it, look into it. Worship it.

When divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low.

It is easy to talk on religion, but difficult to practice it.

Through selfless work, love of God grows in heart.

That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge.

At times Maharajji’s behavior reminds me of a story Ramakrishna tells of a saint who asked a snake not to bite but to love everyone. The snake agreed. But then many people threw things at the snake. The saint found the snake all battered. “I didn’t say not to hiss,” said the saint.

Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.

If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.

God has revealed to me that only the Paramatman, whom the Vedas describe as the Pure Soul, is as immutable as Mount Sumeru, unattached, and beyond pain and pleasure. There is much confusion in this world of His maya. One can by no means say that 'this' will come after 'that' or 'this' will produce 'that'.

God can be realized through all paths. All religions are true. The important thing is to reach the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo steps or by a rope. You can also climb up by a bamboo pole.

Why should you renounce everything? You are all right as you are, following the middle...

God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion...One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way.

It is necessary to pray to Him, with a longing Heart.

He is born in vain, who having attained the human birth, so difficult to get, does not attempt to realize God in this very life.

If a householder is a genuine devotee, he performs his duties without attachment; he surrenders the fruit of his work to God - his gain or loss, his pleasure or pain. Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Abridged)

The personality of Muhammad, it is most difficult to get into the whole truth of it. Only a glimpse of it I can catch. What a dramatic succession of picturesque scenes! There is Muhammad, the Prophet; there is Muhammad, the Warrior; Muhammad, the Businessman; Muhammad, the Statesman; Muhammad, the Orator; Muhammad, the Reformer; Muhammad, the Refuge of Orphans; Muhammad, the Protector of Slaves; Muhammad, the Emancipator of Women; Muhammad, the Judge; Muhammad, the Saint. All in all these magnificent roles, in all these departments of human activities, he is like a hero.

Ramakrishna says, “One who has merely heard of fire has ajnana, ignorance. One who has seen fire has jnana. But one who has actually built a fire and cooked on it has vijnana.” In

If you first fortify yourself with the true knowledge of the Universal Self, and then live in the midst of wealth and worldliness, surely they will in no way affect you.

To work without attachment is to work without the expectation of reward or fear of any punishment in this world or the next. Work so done is a means to the end, and God is the end.

When the flower blooms The bees come uninvited.

Disease is the tax which the soul pays for the body, as the tenant pays house-rent for the use of the house.

Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.

There is no hope for a worldly man if he is not sincerely devoted to God.

Do you know my attitude? Books, scriptures, and things like that only point out the way to reach God. After finding the way, what more need is there of books and scriptures? Then comes the time for action.

The nearer you approach to God, the less you reason and argue. When you attain Him, then all sounds—all reasoning and disputing—come to an end. Then you go into samadhi—sleep—, into communion with God in silence.

Can he rectify false weight whose own scales are uncertain? Can you enlighten your neighbor while you yourself have no light?

How dare you talk of helping the world? God alone can do that. First you must be made free from all sense of self; then the Divine Mother will give you a task to do.

The winds of grace blow all the time. All we need to do is set our sails.

sweetmeat. One moment he enjoys a spiritual mood, and the next moment he is beside himself with the pleasure of ‘woman and gold’.

Ταξίδεψε στις τέσσερις γωνιές της γης, αλλά δεν θα βρεις τίποτα πουθενά. Ό,τι υπάρχει είναι μόνο εδώ.

And naturally I was reading in the library a few days later from a book about the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna, and I stumbled upon a story about a seeker who once came to see the great master and admitted to him that she feared she was not a good enough devotee, feared that she did not love God enough. And the saint said, "Is there nothing you love?" The woman admitted that she adored her young nephew more than anything else on earth. The saint said, "There, then. He is your Krishna, your beloved. In your service to your nephew, you are serving God.

The name of God is identical with the Lord.

Now... We are going in a loop.

Let's not go into the past.

In the scriptures you will find the way to realize God. But after getting all the information about the path, you must begin to work, Only then can you attain your goal.

1. Is anything impossible for the grace of God? Suppose you bring a light into a room that has been dark a thousand years; does it remove the darkness little by little? The room is lighted all at once. Intense renunciation is what is needed.

When the dust of desires is removed, people are automatically attracted to the God just as a dustless needle is attracted to the Magnet (God).

Solitude once in a while and daily chanting of God's name will help purify the mind -

There is God certainly in every being but the God is not all the same in every being. In

The depth of the heart, the retired corner, and the forest are the three places for meditation.

This attempt of yours to make people accept Sri Ramakrishna will hinder the growth of your spiritual power.

The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things. Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us. On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena. But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.

Subtle are the ways of dharma. One cannot realize God if one has even the least trace of desire. A thread cannot pass through the eye of a needle if it has the smallest fibre sticking out.

MASTER: “But even behind the mother’s love lies her hope that the children will support her later on. But I love these youngsters because I see in them Nārāyana Himself. These are not mere words.

jnana is the standard term for the highest kind of knowledge: not scholarship or book-learning but direct knowledge of God, spiritual wisdom. If we take jnana in this sense, we are not left with an obvious meaning for vijnana, a “more intense kind of jnana.” Ramakrishna takes vijnana to mean an intimate, practical familiarity with God, the ability to carry through in daily affairs with the more abstract understanding that is jnana. Ramakrishna says, “One who has merely heard of fire has ajnana, ignorance. One who has seen fire has jnana. But one who has actually built a fire and cooked on it has vijnana.

Zen Buddhism, for example, as practiced by Suzuki, the excellent Japanese mystic, has nothing to do with the superstitious and predjudiced Buddhism that infested Asia for centuries. Sufism, as boasted by the subtle Gurdjeff, totally differs from the Islamism that shouts death to the “infidels.” The doctrine of Vivekananda, inspired by his master Ramakrishna, is nothing like the Hinduism that suffocated India for centures of superstious and stupid passivity; the noble mysticism of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, is nothing like the bloody cultural narrowness and tribal elitism of the mosaic orthodoxy.

The Hindu saint Ramakrishna said that when a man becomes a saint, followers swarm to him as wasps to honey. Because he had to become holy to achieve his charisma, a saint won’t misuse that power, that control over others. But if a common man, a volk, with no saintly quality, with in fact an inflated ego, a narcissist, should tap into this magnetic current or whatever, he could draw legions to him…and lead the world to ruin.” Bibi

The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once said that the mind is like fabric; it takes the color of the dye it’s soaked in. Soak the mind in a quiet, relaxing environment and it will become quiet and relaxed. Soak it in floods of Facebook and, well.…

There is an ocean of difference between a real all-renouncing devotee of God and a householder devotee. A real sannyāsi, a real devotee who has renounced the world, is like a bee. The bee will not light on anything but a flower. It will not drink anything but honey. But a devotee leading the worldly life is like a fly. The fly sits on a festering sore as well as on a

We are all born into different beliefs, and therefore, we should leave it that way”—so goes the tolerant “wisdom” of our time. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, strongly spoke out against the idea of conversion. When people make such statements, they forget or don’t know that nobody is born a Christian. All Christians are such by virtue of conversion. To ask the Christian not to reach out to anyone else who is from another faith is to ask that Christian to deny his own faith. One of India’s leading “saints,” Sri Ramakrishna, is said to have been for a little while a Muslim, for a little while a Christian, and then finally, a Hindu again, because he came to the conclusion that they are all the same. If they are all the same, why did he revert to Hinduism? It is just not true that all religions are the same. Even Hinduism is not the same within itself. Thus, to deny the Christian the privilege of propagation is to propagate to him or her the fundamental beliefs of another religion. If

become.It is said in the Bhagavad Gitâ that the future is determined by the thought that is uppermost at the moment of death, and in the Purâna there is a story that King Bharata was born as a deer p. 48 because when he died, his mind was fixed on the thought of a deer. He who passes away thinking of God and meditating on Him, does not come back to this world. A devotee:

Through the ages, countless yogis, spiritual masters, and enlightened beings such as Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Mahavira, Ramakrishna, and modern mystics such as Amma, Adyashanti, Eckhart Tolle, and Sadhguru, among many others, have all spoken about Oneness.

One day Jatadhari requested Sri Ramakrishna to keep the image and bade him adieu with tearful eyes. He declared that Rāmlālā had fulfilled his innermost prayer and that he now had no more need of formal worship. A few days later Sri Ramakrishna was blessed through Rāmlālā with a vision of Rāmachandra, whereby he realized that the Rāma of the Rāmāyana, the son of Daśaratha, pervades the whole universe as Spirit and Consciousness; that He is its Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer; that, in still another aspect, He is the transcendental Brahman, without form, attribute, or name. While worshipping Rāmlālā as the Divine Child, Sri

No one can say with finality that God is only 'this' and nothing else. He is formless, and again He has forms. For the bhakta He assumes forms. But He is formless for the jnani, that is, for him who looks on the world as a mere dream. The bhakta feels that he is one entity and the world another. Therefore God, reveals Himself to him as a Person. But the jnani — the Vedantist, for instance — always reasons, applying the process of 'Not this, not this'. Through this discrimination he realizes, by his inner perception, that the ego and the universe are both illusory, like a dream. Then the jnani realizes Brahman in his own consciousness. He cannot describe what Brahman is.

Fear: Fear is an emotion that is typically hardwired into our beings to ensure our safety.

Through selfless work, love of God grows in the heart. Then through His grace one realizes Him in course of time. God can be seen. One can talk to Him as I am talking to you.

Who means Who?

The Reality is one and the same; the difference is in name and form.

call It Brahman when It is inactive, and Śakti when It creates, preserves, and destroys. It is like water, sometimes still and sometimes covered with waves. The

meditate upon, I should say: Fix your attention on that form which appeals to you most; but know for certain that all forms are the forms of one God alone.

The nearer you come to God, the more you feel peace. Peace, peace, peace—supreme peace!

The man coming down from samādhi perceives that it is Brahman that has become the ego, the universe, and all living beings. This is known as vijnāna.

A person feels anguish and emptiness at the death of a spouse or child; if one has that kind of longing for God for twenty-four hours continuously, God will definitely reveal Himself.

It may be that there is no solution or it may be that I'm not clever enough to find it. Ramakrishna looked upon the world as the sport of God. "It is like a game," he said. "In this game there are joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil., The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation." I would reject that with all my strength. The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth's crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing colour, and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can't make it anything but fragile. If you drop it on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn't it possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?

God dwells in all beings. But you may be intimate only with good people; you must keep away from the evil-minded. God is even in the tiger; but you cannot embrace the tiger on that account.

So what actually goes on with all this religion business? Does it really matter whether you’re a Gnostic, a Christian, a Muslim, a Shi’ite, a Hindu, a Taoist, a Rosicrucian, a Jew, a Witch or a Jehovah’s Witness? Not in the slightest. (Well, it might matter if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness). Does it matter if you follow the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Ramakrishna or Mary Baker Eddy? Of course not. Does it matter if your ritual object or talisman is a cup, an amulet, a tabernacle, a horseshoe, holy water, a wishbone, a Sanctus bell, a St. Christopher, a baptismal font, a rabbit’s foot, rosary beads, a broomstick or a seven-branched candlestick? No, it’s just something to focus your mind on. The real power is within you. Just as long as it doesn’t become a cop-out. Which it so often does. Why? I’ll tell you. Because Rag, Tag & Bobtail are not willing to take responsibility for their own lives. They need someone to tell them what to do and what to believe. But in reality you don’t need anyone. It’s all there inside you. You grant your own absolution. Hey, it’s your life! You certainly have more control over your ultimate destiny than a priest.

In the Vedas creation is likened to the spider and its web. The spider brings the web out of itself and then remains in it. God is the container of the universe and also what is contained in it.

It is Rāma who has become everything. But, as you say, though all water is Nārāyana, yet some water is fit for drinking, some for washing the hands and face, and some only for cleaning pots and pans.

A man must prepare the way beforehand, so that he may think of God in the hour of death. The way lies through constant practice. If a man practises meditation on God, he will remember God even on the last day of his life.

The bliss of worship and communion with God is the true wine, the wine of ecstatic love. The goal of human life is to love God. Bhakti is the one essential thing. To know God through jnāna and reasoning is extremely difficult.

I started reading the works of Pandurang Vaman Kane, Jadunath Sarkar, Radhakumud Mookerji, R.C. Majumdar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, S.L. Bhyrappa, R. Nagaswamy, Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Dharampal, Kapil Kapoor, Koenraad Elst, Michel Danino, Shrikant G. Talageri, Meenakshi Jain and Sandeep Balakrishna, apart from the publications of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. This was, of course, in addition to the writings of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and other civilisational icons.

While Sri Krishna, Himself God Incarnate, played with the gopis at Vrindāvan, trouble-makers like Jatilā and Kutilā appeared on the scene. You may ask why. The answer is that the play does not develop without trouble-makers. (All laugh.) There is no fun without Jatilā and Kutilā. (Loud laughter.)

The alligator loves to swim on the surface of the water, but is obliged to remain beneath for fear of the hunter. Yet, whenever he finds an opportunity, he rises with a deep whizzing noise, and swims happily on the watery expanse. O man, entangled in the meshes of the world, you too are anxious to swim on the surface of the Ocean of Bliss, but are prevented by the importunate demands of your family! Yet be of good cheer! Whenever you find any leisure, call eagerly upon your God, pray to Him earnestly, and tell Him all your sorrows. In due time, He will surely emancipate you, and enable you to swim happily upon the Ocean of Bliss

If you see anywhere an instance of compassion, as in Vidyāsāgar, know that it is due to the grace of God. Through compassion one serves all beings. Māyā also comes from God. Through māyā God makes one serve one’s relatives. But one thing should be remembered: māyā keeps us in ignorance and entangles us in the world, whereas dayā makes our hearts pure and gradually unties our bonds.

Lovers of God possess intense concentration. In prayer their attention rivets itself so completely onto God that nothing can tear it away. Even a suggestion of the divine may draw them into a higher state of consciousness. Occasionally this can be somewhat inconvenient. Sri Ramakrishna once went to see a religious drama produced by his disciple. The curtain went up and a character started singing the praises of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna immediately began to enter the supreme state of consciousness. The stage faded; the actors and actresses faded. As only a great mystic can, he uttered a protest: "I come here, Lord, to see a play staged by my disciple, and you send me into ecstasy. I won't let it happen!" And he started saying over and over, "Money... money...money," so as to keep some awareness of the temporal world.

Spiritual aspiration, hunger for God, is the most important blessing one can have. Spiritual hunger leads to sincere sadhana, and sincere sadhana leads to a progressive spiritual life. By regular repetition of the diksha mantra, our mind becomes more and more stable and a gradual transformation of consciousness unfolds. Japa is the foundation. Keep the current of Divine Remembrance flowing at all times. There is a river of rapturous bliss ever flowing just underneath our fluctuating thoughts. Sadhana allows us to feel, hear, see and bathe in this celestial stream. It flows in the center of our spine. It flows in the center of our being. It flows from the infinite ocean of satchitananda from which we come, in which we live and into which we will eventually return. The faint intuitive fragrance of this stream is love, happiness, joy and satisfaction. To drink from it directly is mind-blowing ecstasy. To drown in it is immortality, transcending the limitations of time, space and form in the Eternal One: the One we call Kali, the One we call Ramakrishna.

When a man is on the plains, he sees the lowly grass and the mighty pine tree and says: "How big is the tree and how small is the grass!" But when he ascends the mountain and looks down from its high peak the grass and the tree blend into one indistinguishable mass of verdure. So, in the sight of worldly men, there are differences of rank and one is a king and another is a cobbler; one is a father and another is a son; and so on. But when the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low.

The Saguna Brahman is meant for the bhaktas. In other words, a bhakta believes that God has attributes and reveals Himself to men as a Person, assuming forms. It is He who listens to our prayers. The prayers that you utter are directed to Him alone. You are bhaktas, not jnānis or Vedāntists. It doesn’t matter whether you accept God with form or not. It is enough to feel that God is a Person who listens to our prayers, who creates, preserves, and destroys the universe, and who is endowed with infinite power. “It is easier to attain God by following the path of devotion.

My principal purpose here is to point out again, yet more insistently, that one cannot meaningfully consider, much less investigate, the reality of God except in a manner appropriate to the kind of reality God has traditionally been understood to be. Contemplative discipline, while not by any means the only proper approach to the mystery of God, is peculiarly suited to (for want of a better word) an 'empirical' exploration of that mystery. If God is the unity of infinite being and infinite consciousness, and the reason for the reciprocal transparency of finite being and finite consciousness each to the other, and the ground of all existence and all knowledge, then the journey toward him must also ultimately be a journey toward the deepest source of the self. As Symeon the New Theologian was fond of observing, he who is beyond the heavens is found in the depths of the heart; there is nowhere to find him, William Law (1686–1761) was wont to say, but where he resides in you; for Ramakrishna (1836–1886), it was a constant refrain that one seeks for God only in seeking what is hidden in one’s heart; (...) The practice of contemplative prayer, therefore, is among the highest expressions of rationality possible, a science of consciousness and of its relation to the being of all things, (...)