Ramana Maharshi Quotes

When thou standest still from thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed to thee, and so God heareth and seeth through thee. Thine own hearing, willing, and seeing hindereth thee, that thou dost not see nor hear God.

Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.

Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky

Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are.

On the deepest level, what I know for sure is that who I am, essentially, is consciousness and consciousness is timeless and it transcends the body; it transcends the psychological "me," the egoic self. Everybody can know themselves as consciousness.

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.

Above all, know that ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

Enlightenment is always through surrender, but surrender is achieved through intelligence. Only idiots cannot surrender. To surrender you need great intelligence. To see the point of surrender is the climax of insight; to see the point that you are not separate from existence is the highest that intelligence can give to you.

Generally, people who are not self-realized are full of themselves. One who is self-realized sees that the whole world is full of one.

India saw from the beginning, and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

You can't get away from who you are I guess.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

By 1968, both The Beatles and The Beach Boys had plenty of fame - we were looking for something deeper. The Maharishi taught us how to go beyond thinking and action in order to grow from within.

This ego - the less there is of it, the nearer I am to that which I really am: the universal body.

I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems.

Find your true self. The old question, asked in many ages, "Who am I?" Once you figure out who am I, and you know who am I, then you have that knowledge of self.

Transcendence gets you beyond ego. If you go beyond ego, you see all of this in a more decent perspective and you can start to put all the pieces together. We haven't done that yet. Not as a civilization.

When we cultivate mystical awareness or transcendent identity--which is a natural outgrowth of meditation and other practices--what happens is that we begin to take a witness position on our own lives, and that includes our minds. We break the illusion that we think our own thoughts, which is not always the case. Some ideas just arrive in our heads.

There is no mind to control if you realise the self. The mind having vanished, the self shines forth. In the realised man, the mind may be active or inactive, the self remains for him.

We are known in a depth of darkness through which we ourselves do not even dare to look. And at the same time, we are seen in a height of a fullness which surpasses our highest vision.

The finding of God is the coming to one's own self.

Say - i am the Atman in which my lower ego has become merged for ever. Be perfect in this idea; and then as long as the body endures, speak unto others this message of fearlessness: "Thou art That", "Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached!"