Ramana Maharshi Quotes

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

To be and to think are one and the same for us.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it's always now. It's all there is. And if you continuously miss the now - resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments - the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

If he thought at all, but I don't believe he ever thought, it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water.

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.

There are in the human mind a group of faculties and in the brain groups of convolutions, and the facts assembled by science so far allow to state, as I said before, that the great regions of the mind correspond to the great regions of the brain.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

This intelligence itself is modified into what we call egoism, and this intelligence is the cause of all the powers in the body. It covers the whole ground, sub-consciousness, consciousness, and super-consciousness.