Quotes from Ramakrishna

Sugar and sand may be mixed together, but the ant rejects the sand and goes off with the sugar grain; so pious men lift the good from the bad.

Unalloyed love of God is the essential thing. All else is unreal.

When the fruit appears the blossom drops off. Love of God is the fruit, and rituals are the blossom.

Through love one acquires renunciation and discrimination naturally.

Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, you will find nothing (no true religion) anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here (i .e . in one 's own heart.)

The tree laden with fruits always bends low. If you wish to be great, be lowly and meek.

One must be very particular about telling the truth. Through truth one can realize God.

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.

He who is called Krishna is also Siva and the Primal Sakti...He again, who is called Jesus and Allah. Truth is one.

Whoever wants God intensely, finds Him. Go and verify it in your own life.

A man is truly free, even here in this embodied state, if he knows that God is the true agent and he by himself is powerless to do anything.

The world is indeed a mixture of truth and make-believe. Discard the make-believe and take the truth.

Wisdom leads to unity, but ignorance to separation. So long as God seems to be outside and far away, there is ignorance. But when God is realised within, that is true knowledge.

God is in all men, but all men are not in God; that is why we suffer.

If you spent one-tenth of the time you devoted to distractions like chasing women or making money to spiritual practice, you would be enlightened in a few years.

If a white cloth is stained even with a small spot, the stain appears very ugly indeed. So the smallest fault of a holy man becomes painfully prominent.

Men bound hand and foot in the endless chain of cause & effect cannot free each other.

Man needs a guru. But a man must have faith in the guru's words. He succeeds in spiritual life by looking on his guru as God Himself.

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

As a candle cannot burn without fire, so man cannot live without spiritual force.

To work without attachment is to work without the expectation of reward.

Disease is the tax which the soul pays for the body, as the tenant pays house-rent for the use of the house.

If there are errors in other religions, that is none of our business. God, to whom the world belongs, takes care of that.

The world is impermanent. One should constantly remember death.