Ramana Maharshi Quotes

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.

You can spend time self-identifying and figuring out what you are on that, but at some point, you just want to be who you are and not walk around telling people.

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.

Books simply help you to see what is already within your self. That's what enlightenment is all about.

Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.

The only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is You.

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

The real religion is not imitation of anybody else, it is a search to find out your own authentic self, who you are.

What we seek is what we are.

The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul.

This precept descended from Heaven: know thyself.

You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward.

One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself.

He whose book of the heart has been opened needs no other books.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself.

Come to the Root of the Root of your Self

The greatest discovery in life is self-discovery. Until you find yourself you will always be someone else. Become yourself.

You may go on reading any number of books on Meditation. They can only tell you ‘Realize the Self’. The Self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself in yourself.

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.