Advaita Vedanta Quotes

“Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognize it.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. The world is an ocean of pain and fear, anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, coming rarely, quickly gone.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“If you take people to be what they think themselves to be, you will only hurt them as they hurt themselves so grievously all the time. But if you see them as they are in reality, it will do them enormous good.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Freedom means letting go. People just do not care to let go of everything. They do not know that the finite is the price of the infinite, as death is the price of immortality. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out. The “I am” is the door. Stay at it until it opens … It is only when you cannot come and go freely that the house becomes a jail. I move in and out of consciousness easily and naturally and therefore to me, the world is a home, not a prison.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Our minds are just waves on the ocean of consciousness. As waves, they come and go. As ocean, they are infinite and eternal. Know yourself as the ocean of being, the womb of all existence.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“In reality, nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind, destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go - light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make your hooks straight and nothing can hold you.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“It is this clash between desire and fear that causes anger, which is the great destroyer of sanity in life. When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, and both become experience - painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“What refuses to die cannot be reborn.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Our only hope is to stop, to look, to understand, and to get out of the traps of memory. For memory feeds imagination and imagination generates desire and fear.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Things are as they are and nobody in particular is responsible. The idea of personal responsibility comes from the illusion of agency.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“What problems can there be which the mind did not create? Life and death do not create problems; pains and pleasures come and go, experienced and forgotten. It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, colored by like and dislike. Truth and love are man’s real nature, and mind and heart are the means of its expression.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from; only self-knowledge can help you.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The experience of being empty, uncluttered by memories and expectations; it is like the happiness of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such change cannot be imposed; it must come from within.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind and it will be flooded with light.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“I cried when I was born and I shall die laughing.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“When there is total surrender, complete relinquishment of all concern with one’s past, present and future, with one’s physical and spiritual security and standing, a new life dawns, full of love and beauty; then the guru is not important, for the disciple has broken the shell of self-defense. Complete self-surrender is liberation by itself.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“You love yourself and you want yourself to be secure and happy. Don’t be ashamed of it; don’t deny it. It is natural and good to love oneself. Only, you should know exactly what it is that you love. It is not the body that you love, it is Life: perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fullness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on “I am,” “I know,” “I love” - with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The innermost light, shining peacefully and timelessly in the heart, is the real guru. All others merely show the way.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“When the shadow is seen to be only a shadow, you stop following it. You turn around and discover the sun which was there all the time - behind your back!”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Exactly as the shadow appears when light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure self-awareness is obstructed by the “I am the body” idea. And as the shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land, so does the person appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find and lose, according to the pattern of destiny.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Matter is the shape, mind is the name. Together they make the world. Pervading and transcending is Reality, pure being/awareness/bliss, your very essence.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable that you are ready for turning around and stepping into what can be described (when seen from the level of the mind) as emptiness and darkness.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Know yourself as beyond space and time - in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable - you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are - against fear there is no other remedy.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Since time immemorial the dust of events has been covering the clear mirror of your mind, so that you could see only memories. Brush off the dust before it has time to settle; this will lay bare the old layers, until the true nature of your mind is discovered… Dispassion, detachment, freedom from desire and fear, from all self-concern, mere awareness - free from memory and expectation - this is the state of mind in which discovery can happen. After all, liberation is but the freedom to discover.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: pure radiation from an inexhaustible source. In that light, the world appears dimly like a dream.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Happiness is never your own; it is where the “I” is not.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Keep the “I am” in the focus of awareness; remember that you are; watch yourself ceaselessly and the unconscious will flow into the conscious without any special effort on your part. Wrong desires and fears, false ideas, social inhibitions are blocking and preventing its free interplay with the conscious. Once free to mingle, the two become one and the one becomes all. The person merges into the witness, the witness into awareness, awareness into pure being, yet identity is not lost, only its limitations are lost. It is transfigured and becomes the real Self, the sadguru, the eternal friend and guide.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj