"The time was ripe for one to be born, who in one body
would have the brilliant intellect of Sankara and the wonderfully expansive, infinite
heart of Chaitanya; one who would see in every sect the same spirit working, the same God;
one who would see God in every being, one whose heart would weep for the poor, for the
weak, for the outcast, for the downtrodden, for every one in this world, inside India or
outside India; and at the same time whose grand brilliant intellect would conceive of such
noble thoughts as would harmonize all conflicting sects, not only in India but outside of
India, and bring a marvelous harmony, the universal religion of head and heart into
existence. Such a man was born, and I had the good fortune to sit at his feet for years.
Let me now only mention the great Sri Ramakrishna, the fulfillment of the Indian sages,
the sage for the time... For the first time I found a man who dared to say that he saw
God, that religion was a reality to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense
way than we can sense the world. I began to go to that man, day after day, and I actually
saw that religion could be given. One touch, one glance, can change a whole life. I learnt
from my Master that the religions of the world are not contradictory or antagonistic. They
are but various phases of one eternal religion... The first part of my Master's life was
spent in acquiring spirituality, and the remaining years in distributing it... His life is
a searchlight of infinite power thrown upon the whole mass of Indian religious thought. He
was the living commentary to the Vedas and to their aim. He had lived in one life the
whole cycle of the national religious existence in India."
- Swami Vivekananda
"In a recent and unique example, in the life
of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa we see a colossal spiritual capacity first driving straight to
the divine realization, taking, as it were, the Kingdom of Heaven by violence, and then
seizing upon one Yoga method after another and extracting the substance out of it with an
incredible rapidity, always to return to the heart of the whole matter, the realization
and possession of God by the power of love, by the extension of inborn spirituality into
various experience and by the spontaneous play of an intuitive knowledge. Such an example
cannot be generalized. Its object also was special and temporal, to exemplify in the great
and decisive experience of a Master-soul the truth, now most necessary to humanity,
towards which a world long divided into jarring sects and schools is with difficulty
laboring, that all sects are forms and fragments of a single integral truth and all
disciplines labor in their different ways towards one supreme experience... Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa is the epitome of the whole. His was the great super-conscious life which
alone can witness to the infinitude of the current that bears us all oceanwards. He is the
proof of the Power behind us, and the future before us."
-Sri Aurobindo
"Ramakrishna was a living embodiment of
godliness. His sayings are not those of a mere learned man but they are pages from the
Book of Life. They are revelations of his own experiences. They therefore leave on the
reader an impression which he cannot resist. In this age of skepticism Ramakrishna
presents an example of a bright and living faith which gives solace to thousands of men
and women who would otherwise have remained without spiritual light. Ramakrishna's life
was an object-lesson in Ahimsa. His love knew no limits, geographical or otherwise. May
his divine love be an inspiration to all."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"The man whose image I here evoke was the
consummation of two thousand years of the spiritual life of three hundred million people.
Although he has been dead forty years, his soul animates modern India. He was no hero of
action like Gandhi, no genius in art or thought like Gandhi or Tagore. He was a little
village Brahmin of Bengal whose outer life was set in a limited frame without striking
incident, outside the social and political activity of the time. But his inner life
embraced the whole multiplicity of men and Gods. It was a part of the very source of
Energy, the Divine Shakti, of whom Vidyapati, the old poet of Mithila, and Ramprasad of
Bengal sing."
- Romain Rolland
To the Paramahamsa Ramakrishna Deva
"Diverse courses of worship
from varied springs of fulfillment
have mingled in your meditation.
The manifold revelation of the joy of the Infinite
has given form to a shrine of unity in your life
where from far and near arrive salutations
to which I join my own."
- Rabindranath Tagore
"The fervent love of God, nay, the sense of complete
absorption in Godhead, has nowhere found a stronger and more eloquent expression than in
the utterances of Ramakrishna. They show the exalted nature of his faith. How deep he has
seen into the mysteries of knowledge and love of God we see from his sayings... These
utterances of Ramakrishna reveal to us not only his own thoughts, but the faith and hope
of millions of human beings.. .This constant sense of the presence of God is indeed the
common ground on which we may hope that in time not too distant, the great temple of the
future will be erected, in which the Hindus and non-Hindus may join hands and hearts in
worshipping the same Supreme Spirit -- who is not far from every one of us, for in Him we
live and move and have our being."
- Max Muller
"Sri Ramakrishna made his appearance and delivered his
message at the time and the place at which he and his message were needed. This message
could hardly have been delivered by anyone who had not been brought up in the Hindu
religious tradition. Sri Ramakrishna was born in Bengal in 1836. He was born into a world
that in his lifetime was, for the first time, being united on a literally worldwide scale.
Today we are still living in this transitional chapter of the world's history, but it is
already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an
Indian ending, if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race. In the
present age, the world has been united on the material plane by Western technology. But
this Western skill has not only 'annihilated distance'; it has armed the peoples of the
world with weapons of devastating power at a time when they have been brought to point
blank range of each other without yet having learnt to know and love each other. At this
supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is an
Indian way. Sri Ramakrishna's message was unique in being expressed in action. Religion is
not just a matter for study, it is something that has to be experienced and to be lived,
and this is the field in which Sri Ramakrishna manifested his uniqueness... His religious
activity and experience were, in fact, comprehensive to a degree that had perhaps never
before been attained by any other religious genius, in India or elsewhere."
- Arnold Toynbee
"Sri Ramakrishna was completely beyond the average run of
men. He appears rather to belong to the tradition of the great rishis of India, who have
come from time to time to turn our attention to the higher things of life and of the
spirit."
- Jawaharlal Nehru
(About The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna) "Never have
the casual and unstudied utterances of a great religious teacher been set down with so
minute a fidelity. To Western readers, it is true, this fidelity and this wealth of detail
are sometimes a trifle disconcerting; for the social, religious and intellectual frames of
reference within which Sri Ramakrishna did his thinking and expressed his feelings were
entirely Indian. But after the first few surprises and bewilderments, we begin to find
something peculiarly stimulating and instructive about the very strangeness and, to our
eyes, the eccentricity of the man revealed to us in "M's" narrative. What a
scholastic philosopher would call the "accidents" of Ramakrishna's life were
intensely Hindu and therefore, so far as we in the West are concerned, unfamiliar and hard
to understand -- its "essence," however, was intensely mystical and therefore
universal. To read through these conversations in which mystical doctrine alternates with
an unfamiliar kind of humour, and where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu
mythology give place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of
Ultimate Reality is in itself a liberal education in humility, tolerance and suspense of
judgement. We must be grateful to the translator for his excellent version of a book so
curious and delightful as a biographical document, so precious, at the same time, for what
it teaches us of the life of the spirit."
- Aldous Huxley
"This is the story of a phenomenon. I will begin by calling
him simply that rather than 'holy man,' 'mystic,' 'saint,' or 'avatar;' all emotive words
with mixed associations which may attract some readers, repel others. A phenomenon is
often something extraordinary and mysterious. Ramakrishna was extraordinary and
mysterious; most of all to those who were best fitted to understand him. A phenomenon is
always a fact, an object of experience. That is how I shall try to approach Ramakrishna.
Ramakrishna's life, being comparatively recent history, is well documented. In this
respect, it has the advantage over the lives of other earlier phenomena of a like nature.
I believe, or am at least strongly inclined to believe, that he was what his disciples
declared that he was: an incarnation of God upon earth."
- Christopher Isherwood
Biography
Tributes
Teachings
Self-Revelation
Books
