Sri Ramakrishna Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

As Long As I Live, So Long Do I Learn

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.

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'.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

superior devotee of God accepts both the Absolute and the Relative; therefore he is able to enjoy the Divine even when his mind comes down from the Absolute.

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.

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.

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.

One must have this childlike faith in the guru’s words. God cannot be realized by a mind that is hypocritical, calculating, or argumentative. One must have faith and sincerity. Hypocrisy will not do. To the sincere, God is very near; but He is far, far away from the hypocrite.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

What is karmayoga? Its aim is to fix one’s mind on God by means of work. That is what you are teaching. It consists of breath-control,3 concentration, meditation, and so on, done in a spirit of detachment. If a householder performs his duties in the world in a spirit of detachment, surrendering the results to God and with devotion to God in his heart, he too may be said to practise karmayoga. Further, if a person performs worship, japa, and other forms of devotion, surrendering the results to God, he may be said to practise karmayoga. Attainment of God alone is the aim of karmayoga.

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

glories,

LIVING WITH POSSIBILITIES ? A life with wisdom is loaded with full of possibilities, I was reading a book on Gospel of Ramakrishna, there are many interpretations when we live long, when someone asked Sri Ramakrishna why some live long many other die early , Bhagavan said the purpose we live long, try to make some of the more possibilities to learn more and the matters one missed in the busy turbulent world , However many of us have many unfulfilled passions. Do you dream of pursuing your passions? Or maybe you’re looking to make a greater impact on the world? The much we learn from many fruitful lives who made success just not for materialistic gains and make the world a better place to live, wish to live with passion with infinite possibilities reset your thinking, and gain clarity on our purpose in life, ignore irreverent matters who make no difference to the world? Dr.T.V.Rao MD

We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.

Thou workest Thine own work; men only call it theirs.

All doubts disappear after the realization of God. Then the devotee meets the favourable wind. He becomes free from worry. He is like the boatman who, when the favourable wind blows, unfurls the sail, holds the rudder lightly, and enjoys a smoke.

The gross body corresponds to the annamayakosha and the prānamayakosha, the subtle body to the manomayakosha and the vijnānamayakosha, and the causal body to the ānandamayakosha. The Mahākārana, the Great Cause, is beyond the five sheaths. When Chaitanya’s mind merged in That, he would go into samādhi. This is called the nirvikalpa or jada samādhi.

Rājayoga describes how to achieve union with God through the mind—by means of discrimination and bhakti.

What is the use of going to Benares if one does not feel restless for God? And if one feels that longing, then this very place is Benares.

The manifold has come from the One alone, the Relative from the Absolute. There is a state of consciousness where the many disappears, and the One, as well; for the many must exist as long as the One exists. Brahman is without comparison. It is impossible to explain Brahman by analogy. It is between light and darkness. It is Light, but not the light that we perceive, not material light.

As long as you do not feel that God is the Master, you must come back to the world, you must be born again and again. There will be no rebirth when you can truly say, ‘O God, Thou art the Master.’ As long as you cannot say, ‘O Lord, Thou alone art real’, you will not be released from the life of the world. This going and coming, this rebirth, is inevitable. There will be no liberation.

The feeling of ‘I and mine’ has covered the Reality. Because of this we do not see Truth. Attainment of Chaitanya, Divine Consciousness, is not possible without the knowledge of Advaita, Non-duality. After realizing Chaitanya one enjoys Nityānanda, Eternal Bliss. One enjoys this Bliss after attaining the state of a paramahamsa.

Narendra once said, ‘As the “I” of man recedes, the “I” of God approaches.

It is good to prepare for death. One should constantly think of God and chant His name in solitude during the last years of one’s life. If the elephant is put into the stable after its bath it is not soiled again by dirt and dust.

Sattva preserves, rajas creates, and tamas destroys. But Brahman is beyond the three gunas. It is beyond Prakriti.

This world itself is the forest. The three robbers prowling here are sattva, rajas, and tamas. It is they that rob a man of the Knowledge of Truth. Tamas wants to destroy him. Rajas binds him to the world. But sattva rescues him from the clutches of rajas and tamas. Under the protection of sattva, man is rescued from anger, passion, and the other evil effects of tamas. Further, sattva loosens the bonds of the world. But sattva also is a robber. It cannot give him the ultimate Knowledge of Truth, though it shows him the road leading to the Supreme Abode of God.

am not asking you to give up all of the “I”. You should give up only the “unripe I”. The “unripe I” makes one feel: “I am the doer. These are my wife and children. I am a teacher.” Renounce this “unripe I” and keep the “ripe I”, which will make you feel that you are the servant of God, His devotee, and that God is the Doer and you are His instrument.

It is one of the great contributions of Sri Ramakrishna to Indian religious tradition that his spiritual experience has identified the Sakti not as a mere female counterpart of the Absolute, but as the Absolute Himself personalised—the Saguna Brahman of the Vedanta who is the origin, the support and the end of the manifold universe. The Saguna Brahman is, in a devotional sense, Father or Mother, and, for the matter of that, can be invoked in any other loving relationship as Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher and so on. But the Master described the Saguna Brahman specially by the epithet ‘Mother’ and conceived and invoked Him as the Mother of all beings. In doing so, it must be clearly understood that he did not have in mind the contrast between masculinity and femininity or the bipolarity of a male and a female element in the Deity as in orthodox Sakta theologies, although he often used the current phraseology of the Sakta schools. In other words, when God is called Mother, the implication is not so much to give us a Female Deity as to remind men that in His function of redemption (Anugraha), Motherhood is the most adequate of all humanly understandable concepts to describe His unconditioned love to those who seek shelter in Him, abandoning all other support.

Now, it has been pointed out that the vijnani gains back an ego when he emerges from the nirvikalpa state. But this ego or individuality is entirely different in quality from that of the unenlightened man. To put it briefly, the ordinary man's ego is body-centred, while the vijnani's is God-centred. The body-centred ego is based on a sense of absolute reality of difference, and expresses itself in terms of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ with regard to all objects and individuals. It evaluates everything and everyone in terms of their contribution to its pleasure and survival. An egocentred man may love others, but it is in terms of his narrow self and the preservation of that narrow self and its interests is his primary concern in life. In contrast to this, the vijnani's ego is entirely based on a sense of intimate relationship with God as His son, servant, comrade, sweetheart, etc. He looks upon all beings and objects, irrespective of their attitude towards him as a friend, foe or neutral as manifestations of the Lord to be loved and served, and not as objects for his enjoyment and aggrandisement

The state of mind of the vijnani is what is called bhavamukha. The mind of the ignorant man is circumscribed by his individuality and he sees everything else as discrete objects outside himself, having their fixed contours. But the vijnani is aware of a Cosmic Whole, a Cosmic Mind, from whom the ideation known as the universe radiates and in whom all beings and objects are like bubbles in a layer of water, or waves on the ocean's surface—a part and parcel of the Whole, but with individualities that are of the stuff of ideas or fluid contents of Its own stuff or substance. He is not only aware of It but feels as one with It, either as a part of It or as Itself. So, when it is said that bhavamukha is the state of mind of the vijnani, it means that the vijnani is aware of his identity with the Cosmic Whole. As a consequence, a person in the state of bhavamukha shares the knowledge and outlook of the Cosmic Whole.

In Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master, this alternation between the devotee-mood and the saviour-mood was often noted, because his life was recent and was subjected to study by men who closely observed and recorded it, unlike in the case of the past Incarnations, whose lives have been clothed, long after their passing away, in thundering miracles by poets and mythologists. This process of distortion was partly due to a studied effort on the part of their followers to hide their human side. For, they felt it detrimental to their glory as divinities if any human qualities were allowed to percolate through their divinities. But an Incarnation is man and God in one, and the concept loses all its significance when the Incarnate is made into a Deity.

The Master's practice of different religions and his realisation that there are ‘as many ways as there are religions’ are of great importance to humanity, as they give a solution to the problem posed by religious plurality. Because of the lack of insight into, and appreciation of, the essential teachings of different religions among their followers, conflicts between them and attempts at mutual destruction, either by force or by fraudulent conversions, have bedevilled the history of religions in the past. It is true that many of those conflicts really arose from man's cupidity and spirit of aggrandisement. The religious shibboleths they used were only smokescreens for cunning political and military leaders to hide their real intentions. Still, there was a tendency for one religion to stigmatise another as the work of the devil, and consider its followers as reserved for hell. That helped aggressors to find in religion a means for winning mass support and a sanction for their nefarious activities. The Master's realisation of all religions as leading to the same goal would force all honest religious leaders to eliminate from their theological vocabulary words such as heathen, kaffir, mlechcha, etc., indicative of contempt and disrespect. As a consequence, it would encourage their followers to consider the followers of all other religions as fellow pilgrims to the same destination, even though along different roads from different directions.

It implies that a Hindu, or a Christian, or a Muslim must each follow his own religion most devotedly, but also at the same time accept the validity of all religions other than his own. It is not a question of a mere patronising toleration of others, but acceptance of the correctness of the others' path as much as one's own. It is not toleration but mutual acceptance that the Master's teachings demand.

Faith and devotion are two important milestones on the path towards God. Faith removes worry, anxiety, and fear, while devotion makes life smooth and joyful. Human life becomes very painful and burdensome if a person has no one to trust and love. Spiritual seekers who put their trust in God and love Him wholeheartedly surrender themselves to Him, and as a result, God, the Eternal Father, takes care of them. Just as children enjoy a carefree life in their own homes, so spiritual seekers live happily in this world. Truly, God provides whatever His devotees need.

Nothing should be done on the spur of the moment. God alone knows what He means to do through a particular person. Where will your wife and children be if you leave the world? You must not try to upset the arrangement God has made for you. Everything will come in time.

Sri Ramakrishna became stern: “What will you gain by renouncing the world? Living a family life is like living in a fort. It is easier to fight an enemy from inside a fort than from outside. You will be in a position to renounce the world when you can bestow three-fourths of your mind on God, but not before

Doubt is a terrible disease, and a doubting soul suffers very much. But it is hard to completely uproot doubt from the mind. Every spiritual seeker has to pass through this “dark night of the soul.

If you desire to live in the world unattached, you should first practise devotional disciplines in solitude for some time.

Further, God is the lotus and the devotee the bee. The devotee sips the honey of the lotus. As a devotee cannot live without God, so also God cannot live without His devotee. Then the devotee becomes the sweetness, and God its enjoyer.

A householder has his duties to discharge, his debts to pay: his debt to the gods, his debt to his ancestors, his debt to the rishis, and his debt to his wife and children. If a wife is chaste, then her husband should support her; he should also bring up their children until they are of age.

The first type is mainly interested in worldly enjoyment; the second type enjoys the world but also keeps his or her mind on God; and the third type is totally devoted to spiritual pursuits.

Sri Ramakrishna welcomed with open arms all the diversities of spiritual life and enriched India by incorporating in it all the new spiritual forces and directing all of them to Advaita [Oneness].

Salutations to Sri Ramakrishna, conqueror of lust and gold, knower of Brahman, king among the devotees, saviour of mankind, and a deep ocean where the rivers of all religions merged.

Those who call on Me only in the days of affliction, to them too I bring succour and refuge.

Complete self-surrender is more binding than the observance of strict disciplines.

a large extent progress in spiritual life depends on the intensity of one’s effort. Yet it still takes time to eradicate past samskaras(impressions of the mind). In Girish’s case, however, his faith and love were so intense that a transformation in his life was brought about very quickly. In spite of this, Sri Ramakrishna once remarked about Girish to another devotee, “You may wash a thousand times a cup that has held a solution of garlic; but is it ever possible to get rid of the smell altogether?” Girish heard about it and he was hurt. He went to Sri Ramakrishna and asked, “Will this smell of garlic go?” “Yes, it will.” “So you say it will.” “All smell disappears when a blazing fire is lighted. If you heat a cup smelling of garlic, you get rid of the smell; it becomes a new cup.

There are many opinions about God. Each opinion is a path. There are innumerable opinions and innumerable paths leading to God.” Bhavanath: “Then what should we do?” Master: “You must stick to one path with all your strength. A man can reach the roof of a house by stone stairs or a ladder or a rope-ladder or a rope or even by a bamboo pole. But he cannot reach the roof if he sets foot now on one and now on another. He should firmly follow one path with all his strength.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all.

Jnāna is the characteristic of Śiva, and bhakti of Vishnu. One who partakes of Śiva’s nature becomes a jnāni, and one who partakes of Vishnu’s nature becomes a bhakta.