Be As You Are Quotes

“Does a man who is acting on the stage in a female part forget that he is a man? Similarly, we too must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are

“Reality must be always real. It is not with forms and names. That which underlies all these is the reality. It underlies limitations, being itself limitless. It is not bound. It underlies unrealities, itself being real. Reality is that which is. It is as it is. It transcends speech. It is beyond the expressions 'existence', 'non-existence' etc.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are

“It is enough that one surrenders oneself. Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one’s being. Do not delude yourself by imagining such a source to be some God outside you. One’s source is within oneself. Give yourself up to it. That means that you should seek the source and merge in it.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are

“All religions first postulate three principles, the world, the soul and God. To say that one principle alone appears as the three principles or that the three principles are always three principles is possible only as long as the ego exists.1”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“All that is needed is that you give up your realisation of the not-true as true.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite being, and then weep that you are but a finite creature. Then you take up this or that spiritual practice to transcend the non-existent limitations. But if your spiritual practice itself assumes the existence of the limitations, how can it help you to transcend them?”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“The fact is, you are ignorant of your blissful state. Ignorance supervenes and draws a veil over the pure Self which is bliss. Attempts are directed only to remove this veil of ignorance which is merely wrong knowledge. The wrong knowledge is the false identification of the Self with the body and the mind. This false identification must go, and then the Self alone remains.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“As soon as one ceases to imagine that one is an individual person, inhabiting a particular body, the whole superstructure of wrong ideas collapses and is replaced by a conscious and permanent awareness of the real Self. At this level of the teaching there is no question of effort or practice. All that is required is an understanding that the Self is not a goal to be attained, it is merely the awareness that prevails when all the limiting ideas about the not-Self have been discarded.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“Q: How has srishti [creation] come about? Some say it is predestined. Others say it is the Lord's leela or sport. What is the truth? A: Various accounts are given in books. But is there creation? Only if there is creation do we have to explain how it came about. We may not know about all these theories but we certainly know that we exist. Why not know the ‘I' and then see if there is a creation?”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“The state of Self-realisation, as we call it, is not attaining something new or reaching some goal which is far away, but simply being that which you always are and which you always have been.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“If the idea ‘I am the body’ is accepted, the selves are multiple. The state in which this idea vanishes is the Self since in that state there are no other objects.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi