Ramana Maharshi on happiness

July 23, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

(mage from innerspiritualawakening.com)

“Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.”

~ Ramana Maharshi

Ramana Maharshi (December 20, 1879 – April 14, 1950) was an Indian Hindu sage and jivanmukta. He was born Venkataraman Iyer, but is mostly known by the name Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. He was born in Tiruchuli, Tamil Nadu, India in 1879. Wikipedia

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Quotes

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“Falling in love is a form of mystical envisioning in which one sees the beloved as he or she is seen through the eyes of God.”
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“Translation is comfort food for the soul.”
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“The ego gets what it wants with words. The soul finds what it needs in silence.”
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“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
―George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

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–Richard Branam

“Question: How old is being? Answer: It’s not.”
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“Critique of one’s body without regard to the context of one’s psyche is a form of pornography.”
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“I am a Dictionary.”
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“Truth is not a zero-sum game.”
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“There is no Supreme Being. There is only Being. And we are all that Being.”
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“The Universe loves it when we Translate.”
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“Translation is ‘magical thinking’ based on self-evident axioms and syllogistic reasoning (which is to say that Translation is not magical thinking at all).”
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“You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your own fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.”
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“Love is the perfume of Truth.”
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“Anger is traditionally thought to be close to wisdom. When not projected outward onto others or inward toward the self, it gives us the necessary energy and clarity to understand what needs to be done.”
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“Being has no past, no future, only the endless, beginningless Present.”
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“Truth moves at the speed of now.”
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“Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.”
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“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape one hundred days of sorrow.”
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“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

“Show up. Dive in. Keep at it.”
– Barack Obama

“Give me some TRUTH!”
–Seen on a bumper sticker in Redondo Beach, CA

“At times I think and at times I am.”
–Paul Valéry

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”
–Simone de Beauvoir

“The Cosmic Intention is to evolve from a thing to a think.”
–Melissa Goodnight, H.W., M.

“It is so respectful to not get involved in somebody else’s angst.”
–Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
–Leonard Cohen, from his song “Anthem”

“Handsome is as handsome does.”
–Proverb

“If you are not admiring a young man, you are abusing him.”
–Robert Graves

“Voting is a spiritual activity.”
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“[B]y man came death. [By God comes life].”
–I Corinthians 15:21

“The inner children of the past shut up when you listen to them.”
–paraphrasing Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.

“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
–R.W. Emerson

“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”
–Mother Teresa

“Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self.”
–May Sarton

“Nothing that you lose is real. Nothing that is real can ever be lost.”
–Al Haferkamp, H.W., M.

“Man will not be satisfied until he is everywhere equally present.”
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“Human consciousness is how the universe understands itself.”
–Joe Ciriello, H.W., m

“Gravity is a matter of interest.”
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“There is NO gender to art.”
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“What was once invention is now convention.”
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“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, but once it gets its pants on, watch out!!!”
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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
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“You can’t change your shoes while you’re standing in them.”
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“Solitude is the cure for loneliness.”
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“If it’s an essential mission, God sends a team.”
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“Handsome is a sort of kindness.”
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“My experiences are temporary, but Truth is eternal”.
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“The ear longs to hear what the heart already knows.”
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“Occupy Yourself!”
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“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”
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“Curb your God.”
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“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will truly know peace.”
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“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
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“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
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“The mind loves truth and so does the body.”
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“I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
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“There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.”
— Chandogya Upanishad

“Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.”
–Soren Kierkegaard

“My life is not mine.”
–Rumi

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
–William S. Burroughs

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.”
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“Love? What is it? Most natural pain killer what there is. LOVE.”
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“We acquire the strength we have overcome.”
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“I am all other men.”
–Schopenhauer

“Man is, that he might have joy.”
–Joseph Smith

“To the man who can perfectly practice inaction, all things are possible.”
–Ernest Holmes in Science of Mind

“People will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel.”
–Tom Asacker

“We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.”
— J.M. Barrie in Tommy and Grizel

“If you don’t believe in something greater than yourself, you’ll never do anything greater than yourself.”
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“Boredom is the child of self-centeredness.”
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“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
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“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that your life could have been any different.”
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“When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.”
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“Don’t look at me like I’ve gotten old or something like that.”
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“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
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“Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away”
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“I REFUSE to participate in a recession.”
–bumper sticker

“We believe . . . different from Wall Street. We believe customer No. 1, employee No. 2, and shareholder No. 3. This is my religion.”
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“Fear is a choice.”
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“Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
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“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
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“When people asked [Jacques Cousteau], ‘Well, Captain, what do you expect to find?’ he always said, ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t go.’”
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“Let life happen to you. Life is in the right, always.”
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“And, as [Picasso] said, at the end of his life, he was in dialogue with the old masters, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens. He thought he was talking to them and that they were talking back to him through his art.”
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“The world breaks everyone but afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”
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“Inside every head is a different world.”
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“Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.”
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“If you’re neurotic and you think, I’m not where I deserve to be or my mother didn’t love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you’re plagued by it ’til it’s cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.”
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“If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.”
–Benjamin Alire Saenz

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
–Anais Nin

“Often people think that it’s a question of adrenaline, [that] it’s an adrenaline addiction. I think what they are addicted to essentially is brotherhood. It’s a very healthy impulse that is taking place in a very unhealthy place.”
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“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
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“Love well, be loved and do something of value.”
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“Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.”
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“You don’t attract what you want. You attract what you are.”
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“We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in.”
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“Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.”
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“If things don’t seem out of control, you’re not going fast enough.”
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“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
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“A change in the weather is sufficient to re-create the world and ourselves.”
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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
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“Have an open-mind, but don’t let your brains fall out.”
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“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
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“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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Bathtub Bulletin

Ramana Maharshi on happiness

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Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more