Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
What is beautiful? Whatever is perceived joyfully is beautiful. Bliss is the essence of beauty.Collection: Beauty
Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn on you.Collection: Heart
Absolute perfection is here and now, not in some future, near or far.Collection: Perfection
All you need is to stop searching outside for what can be found only within. Set your vision right before you operate. You are suffering from acute misapprehension . Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life - this is the quickest way to a change in your world.Collection: Heart
Look at your mind dispassionately; this is enough to calm it. When it is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. Stop it - and just BE.Collection: Spiritual
Easier to change, than to suffer. Grow out of your childishness.That is all.Collection: Suffering
By all means be selfish; the right way. Wish yourself well, labour at what is good for you. Destroy all that stands between you and happiness. Be all; love all; be happy; make happy. No happiness is greater.Collection: Selfish
The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.Collection: Life
Until we can look at fear and accept it as the shadow of personal existence, as persons we are bound to be afraid.Collection: Fear
In the light of consciousness all sorts of things happen and one need not give special importance to any. The sight of a flower is as marvelous as the vision of God. Let them be. Why remember them and then make memory into a problem? Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient. Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens.Collection: Peace
We are slaves of what we don't know;of what we know we are masters.Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discoverand understand its cause and workings,we overcome it by the very knowing.The primary purpose of meditation is to become more consciousand familiar with our inner life.The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life.Collection: Knowing
Being oneself is completely beyond all motivation. You cannot be yourself for some reason. You are yourself, and no reason is needed.Collection: Being Yourself
Get hold of the main thing: That the world and the self are one and perfect. Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment.Collection: Attitude
The world is an illusion. Why is it unreal? Because none of the knowledge is going to remain permanent, as real knowledge. I had a number of identities; I was a child, I was a boy, I was a teenager, I was a middle-aged man, I was an old man. Like other identities I thought would remain constant, they never remained so. Finally, I became very old. . . So which identity remained honest with me?Collection: Children
You will get to your maturity quickly if you stay in the nothingness.Collection: Maturity
Forget the known, don't be all the time immersed in your experiences.Collection: Forget
Between the banks of pleasure and pain flows the river of life. If you spend much time on either bank you will miss out on life.Collection: Pain
I am told I was born. I do not remember.Collection: Remember
Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. This is what I call nisarga yoga, the Natural yoga. It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.Collection: Art
There is no second, or higher self to search for. You are the highest self, only give up the false ideas you have about your self.Collection: Giving Up
There is nothing wrong with duality as long as it does not create conflict. Multiplicity and variety without strife is joy. In pure consciousness there is light. For warmth, contact is needed. Above the unity of being is the union of love. Love is the purpose of duality.Collection: Spiritual
Laugh with people laughing, cry with people crying, but don't fall into the river of world illusion. Stay on the banks.Collection: Fall
See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don't be lazy to think.Collection: Pain
Words can bring you only up to their own limit; to go beyond, you must abandon them. Remain as the silent witness only.Collection: Limits
The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet, it is still a desire. All desires must be given up for the real to be.....When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State.Collection: Spiritual
Whatever comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences.Collection: Reality
Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you don't want to suffer, don't go to sleep.Collection: Pain
The sum and substance of my teaching is this: Don't be dishonest to your vital breath; worship that only, abide in that only, accept it as yourself. And when you worship in this manner, it can lead you anywhere, to any heights- this is the quintessence of my talks.Collection: Spiritual
You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, to protect yourself against extinction. And as you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. But what you call survival is but the survival of a dream.Collection: Dream
To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. Your own desires and fears prevent you from understanding and thereby helping others. In reality there are no others, and by helping yourself you help everybody else. If you are serious about the suffering of mankind, you must perfect the only means of help you have, yourself.Collection: Pain
Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of 'I'Collection: Sleep
You are not in the world...the world is in you," what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world," that is, there is no "you" that is real or in any world. "The world is in you" means that the world is in your "mind" and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]Collection: Real
Pure knowledge is not imparted by another; it comes unmasked. It is the one that is listening: it is your own true nature.Collection: Listening
There is no 'my self' and 'his self'. There is the Self, the only Self of all. Misled by the diversity of names and shapes, minds and bodies, you imagine multiple selves.Collection: Self
To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something [the Reality] beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of Pure Awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time.Collection: Reality
The real is behind and beyond words, incommunicable, directly experienced, explosive in its effect on the mind. It is easily had when nothing else is wanted.Collection: Real
There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot.Collection: Smell
True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away. Pleasure and pain alternate inexorably. Happiness comes from the Self and can be found in the Self only. Find your real Self and all else will come with it.Collection: Spiritual
Once you say 'I want to find Truth', all your life will be deeply affected by it. All your mental and physical habits, feelings and emotions, desires and fears, plans and decisions will undergo a most radical transformation.Collection: Spiritual
Do what you believe in and believe in what you do. The rest is a waste of time and energy.Collection: Believe
Your own self is your ultimate teacher. The outer teacher is merely a milestone. It is only your inner teacher that will walk with you to the goal, for he is the goalCollection: Teacher
Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret it.Collection: Regret
You can become a night watchman and live happily. It is what you are inwardly that matters. Your inner peace and joy you have to earn. It is much more difficult than earning money. No university can teach you to be yourself.Collection: Being Yourself
Your first task is to see the sorrow in you and around you; your next, to long intensely for liberation. The very intensity of longing will guide you; you need no other guide.Collection: Spiritual
My actual experience is not different. It is my evaluation and attitude that differ. I see the same world as you do, but not the same way. There is nothing mysterious about it. Everybody sees the world through the idea he has of himself. As you think yourself to be, so you think the world to be. If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear.Collection: Attitude
Just keep in mind the feeling 'I am', merge in it, till your mind and feeling become one. By repeated attempts you will stumble on the right balance of attention and affection and your mind will be firmly established in the thought-feeling 'I am'. Whatever you think, say, or do, this sense of immutable and affectionate being remains as the ever-present background of the mind.Collection: Spiritual