Ramana Maharshi Quotes

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind.

Nothing is real if you don't believe in who you are!

Individuals have to decide what is true and real for them.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

How was I supposed to know what's real and what's not? It feels like I'm the only one who doesn't know the difference.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

We live on two levels ... the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Our consciousness is our contribution to reality. What we perceive as real, becomes real.

I tried to find something real in essentially something thats science fiction or something-for me, anyways-not having an experience like this.

The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive it at this moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you see it at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many “real worlds” as there are people!

I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.

Everything I've seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I've seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination--except that it was all reality.