Ramakrishna Quotes

The wave is not the water. The water merely told us about the wave moving by.

Of the four elements water is the second in weight and the second in respect of mobility. It is never at rest until it unites with the sea.

All life is a movement in relationship. There is no living thing on earth which is not related to something or other.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

What we share with another ceases to be our own.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.

The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.

Try squeezing a handful of water, and see how quickly it disappears. But relax and let your hand flow in the same water, and you have the experience of the water as long as you like.

You can't have something without nothing.

I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance.

Just as man's physical existence was liberated when he grasped that 'nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed', so his consciousness will be liberated when grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed - that the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of his cognitive faculty.

A wave in the ocean is a wave, only in so far as it is bound by name and form.

If the infinite had no me, then me would be its limit. It would not be the infinite, therefore it would not be.

I think, therefore I am ... not here.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

[On common water.] Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

Water runneth smoothest where it is deepest.

Water its living strength first shows, When obstacles its course oppose.

Every wave is new until it breaks.

Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.