Ramana Maharshi Thinking Quotations

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.

You need not aspire for or get any new state. Get rid of your present thoughts, that is all.

If one wants to abide in the thought-free state, a struggle is inevitable. One must fight one's way through before regaining one's original primal state. If one succeeds in the fight and reaches the goal, the enemy, namely the thoughts, will all subside in the Self and disappear entirely.

...the Lord of the Universe carries the entire burden of this world. You imagine you do. You can hand all your burdens over to His care. Whatever you have to do, you will be made an instrument for doing it at the right time. Do not think you cannot do it unless you have the desire to do it. Desire does not give you the strength for doing. The entire strength is the Lord's.

You are the Supreme Being, and yet thinking yourself to be separate from it, you strive to become united with it. What is stranger than this?

When one remains without thinking one understands another by means of the universal language of Silence.

Keep the remembrance of your real nature alive, even while working, and avoid haste which causes you to forget. Be deliberate. Practice meditation to still the mind and cause it to become aware of its true relationship to the Self which supports it. Do not imagine that it is you who are doing the work. Think that is the underlying current which is doing it. Identify yourself with the current.

You are the witness of the three bodies: the gross, the subtle, and the causal, and of the three times: past, present and future, and also this void. In the story of the tenth man, when each of them counted and thought they were only nine, each one forgetting to count himself, there is a stage when they think one is missing and do not know who it is; and that corresponds to the void. We are so accustomed to the notion that all that we see around us is permanent and that we are this body, that when all this ceases to exist we imagine and fear that we also have ceased to exist.

If a person realises his position and stays in his own self, things that are to happen will happen. Things that are not to happen will not happen. The shakti that is in the world, is only one. All these troubles arise if we think that we are separate from that shakti.

The main factor in meditation is to keep the mind active in its own pursuit without taking in external impressions or thinking of other matters.

The master is within; meditation is meant to remove the ignorant idea that he is only outside. If he is a stranger whom you await, he is bound to disappear also. What is the use of a transient being like that? But so long as you think you are separate or that you are the body, an external master is also necessary and he will appear to have a body. When the wrong identification of oneself with the body ceases, the master will be found to be none other than the Self.

It is within our competence to think and become bound, or to cease thinking and thus be free.

Eating, bathing, going to the toilet, talking, thinking, and many other activities related to the body are all work. How is it that the performance of one particular act is alone (considered) work? To be still is to be always engaged in work. To be silent is to be always talking.

He who thinks he is the doer is also the sufferer.

There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh ... at all your past efforts. That which will be the day you laugh is also here and now.

Turn the mind inward and cease thinking of yourself as the body; thereby you will come to know that the self is ever happy. Neither grief nor misery is experienced in this state.

The Sage has no thinking mind and therefore there are no ‘others’ for him.