Ramakrishna Quotes

He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.

Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can't stand the suffering anymore.

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.

A text of Tibetan Buddhism describes the time of death as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and a period that determines our next incarnation.

Life is like a piece of string with a lot of knots tied in it. The knots are the karma you're born with from all your past lives, and the object of human life is to try and undo all those knots. That's what chanting and meditation in God consciousness can do. Otherwise you simply tie another ten knots each time you try to undo one knot. That's how karma works.

When you become completely loving and kind without fear and without thought of harming others, you graudate from the Earth school. That is when reincarnation ends.

As a piece of rope, when burnt, retains its form, but cannot serve to bind, so is the ego which is burnt by the fire of supreme Knowledge.

Truth burns up all karma and frees you from all births.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even get the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth... we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

According to the Buddhist belief, you can go on and on indefinitely, so you see your life as just a brief moment in time.

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass.

It isn't true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times, if you know how.

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

The soul grows by reincarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for inevitably he climbs towards God.

If one marries out of necessity, he will have to reincarnate to reach the point where he wants to live only for God.

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher's help.

Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

There are Eastern religions that deny the reality of pain and suffering. They just try to wipe it away by saying it's all an illusion.

I saw Krishnamurti speak one time. And I thought, I'm not going to live here.

The true nature of soul is right knowledge, right faith and right conduct. The soul, so long as it is subject to transmigration, is undergoing evolution and involution.

I don't have no fear of death. My only fear is coming back reincarnated.

Reincarnation occurs because we decide that we haven't learned enough lessons.

The worlds in which man is evolving as he treads the circle of births and deaths are three: the physical world, the astral or intermediate world, the mental or heavenly world.