Ramakrishna Quotes

Without knowledge there can be no sure progress. Vice and barbarism are the inseparable companions of ignorance. Nor is it too much to say that, except in rare instances, the highest virtue is attained only through intelligence.

The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.

We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Well isn’t that one thing you’re all the more wise for? Age has taught you something. It seems to me that you know the big secret. That nobody knows what’s going on

What transforms this world is - knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.

Go on saying, I am free. Never mind if the next moment delusion comes and says, I am bound. Dehypnotize the whole thing.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.

I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.

Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.

To the ignorant, even the words of wise seem foolishness.

The only death I fear is dying ignorant.

The wise are not learned, the learned are not wise.

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.

All ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.

Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value, if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery.

There is nothing new to gain. On the other hand a man must lose his ignorance. That is all.

The difference between a learned man and an ignorant one is the same as that between a living man and a corpse.