Ramana Maharshi Quotes

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

It's one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

All consciousness is consciousness of something

All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

You take the senses away, and there is no consciousness. Consciousness comes from experience.

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.

The felt presence of immediate experience-- this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.