Ramana Maharshi Quotes

The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I,' under another form, continues the task of existence.

Fears and lies intensify consciousness.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

Cynicism is fear posing as confidence; joy is hope let off the leash.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

In order that a "self" may exist there must be some continuity of mental experiences and, particularly, continuity bridging gaps of unconsciousness. For example, the continuity of our "self" is resumed after sleep, anaesthesia, and the temporary amnesias of concussion and convulsions.

Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep

If your heart is full of fear, you won't seek truth; you'll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind.

When a contestant actually loses consciousness, I think that's a good sign.

The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.

We're asleep until we love.

Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.

There are some moments you'd rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it's mostly those moments in which it's smarter-safer- to stay awake.

To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse - that cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.

I've just discovered the secret of golf. You can't play a really hot game unless you're so miserable that you don't worry over your shots. Take the case of a chip shot, for instance. If you're really wretched, you don't care where the ball is going and so you don't raise your head to see. Grief automatically prevents pressing and over-swinging. Look at the top-notchers. Have you ever seen a happy pro?

Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.

The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of the state of your mind.

What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.

He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.

I am what I feel and think and do.

Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy.

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?

People die of fright and live of confidence.

The world you see outside of you will always be a reflection of what you have inside of you.