100+ BEST RAM DASS QUOTES ABOUT LOVE, LIFE AND DEATH

Looking for famous quotes by Baba Ram Dass? We have rounded up the best collection of Baba Ram Dass quotes, sayings, phrases, one-liners, (with images and pictures) about love, life, death, relationship, meditation, enlightenment, to inspire you spiritually.

BEST RAM DASS QUOTES

“Be here, now!”
“Wherever you are, be all there.”
“We’re all just walking each other home.”
“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
“Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?”
“Inspiration is God making contact with itself.”
“You can’t build joy on a feeling of self-loathing.”
“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
“It’s all real and it’s all illusory: that’s Awareness!”
“You are joy, wisdom, peace, compassion, and love.”
“If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.”
“The gift you offer another person is just your being.”
“When you know how to listen everybody is the guru.”
“The person who says, ‘I’m enlightened’ probably isn’t.”
“We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.”
“You can do nothing for your child but work on yourself.”
“I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.”
“Meditation and concentration are the way to a life of serenity.”
“The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.”
“The art of listening comes from a quiet mind and an open heart.”
“If you want to cure the world, Don’t emanate fear – emanate love.”
“If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.”
“You can be still and still moving. Content even in your discontent.”
“The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.”
“Don’t compare your path with anybody else’s. Your path is unique to you.”
“Be patient. You’ll know when it’s time for you to wake up and move ahead.”
“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!”
“Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.”
“When you are causing suffering to others, you are causing suffering to yourself.”
“What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
“We’re fascinated by the words – but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
“Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life and yet less attached to it.”
“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”
“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.”
“A being whose awareness is totally free, who does not cling to anything is liberated.”
“Faith is not a belief, faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell.”
“My guru said that when he suffers, it brings him closer to God. I have found this, too.”
“You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s a part of the dance.”
“Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”
“Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.”
“It’s just an inevitable process. It’s inevitable. It’s just happening. It’s got to happen that way.”
“When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn’t.”
“Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.”
“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.”
“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”
“Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.”
“Gratitude opens your heart, and opening your heart is a wonderful and easy way for God to slip in.”
“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.”
“We’re sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine!”
“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”
“If you would truly bring peace to the world, identify with that place within you where you are Peace.”
“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion – and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.”
“When you want to become free, your righteousness and anger are much less interesting than they used to be.”
“I am not this body. I am in this body, and this is part of my incarnation and I honor it but that isn’t who I am.”
“Ask yourself: Where am I? Answer: Here. Ask yourself: What time is it? Answer Now. Say it until you can hear it.”
“The more conscious that a being becomes, the more he can use any occupation as a vehicle for spreading light.”
“Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being. We are enough.”
“When joy has a reason, it is not going to last very long. When joy is without any reason, it is going to be there forever.”
“When we see the beloved in each person, it’s like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.”
“As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving: you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.”
“When you are completely identified with your thinking mind you are totally separate from everything else in the universe.”
“Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again; for I am like the moon, you will see me with a new face everyday.”
“In India, there’s a way of seeing life as a cosmic play. It’s called Lila. I can watch my life, and I can see my guru playing with me.”
“I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.”
“We often think that vulnerability is a kind of weakness, but there’s a kind of vulnerability that is actually strength and presence.”
“From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you.”
“Life is an incredible curriculum in which we live it richly and passionately as a way of awakening to the deepest truth of our being.”
“Be here now. Don’t anticipate. Don’t yearn for things of the past. Let the past go with forgiveness. And let the future go with no anticipation.”
“Everyone should smile. Life really isn’t that serious. We make it hard. The sun rises. The sun sets. We just tend to complicate the process.”
“Our rational minds can never understand what has happened, but our hearts, if we can keep them open to God, will find their own intuitive way.”
“I can resonate with you in the highest place I am. So: I can do anything for you but work on myself… You can do nothing for me but work on yourself!”
“The key to the spiritual journey is not acquiring something outside of yourself. Rather it is shedding the veils to come back to the deepest truth of your being.”
“Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed all the beings around you are souls, be one, see one.”
“If I’m going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. If I’m going to live, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart.”
“What are you doing? Planning for the future? Well it’s all right now but later? ….. Forget it baby. That’s later now is now are you going to be here or not? It’s as simple as that!”
“Human beings are part of nature. When you’re seeing the ocean or the lake or the river you’re seeing yourself. Nature is a manifestation of God, and that manifestation is love all way.”
“The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.”
“The most exquisite paradox…as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”
“Once you have drunk from the water of unconditional love, no other well can satisfy your thirst. The pangs of separation may become so intense that seeking the affection of the beloved becomes an obsession.”
“The ego is frightened by death, because ego is a part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.”
“I was no longer needing to be special because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe, like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is.”
“If you meditate regularly, even when you don’t feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.”
“A Tibetan Lama said to me, “The best place to stand, Ram Dass, is halfway between hope and hopelessness.” So I can write a scenario for the 21st century in either direction. One is that it all goes to hell and that it’s truly the dark age.”
“The entire Universe is awareness. It is not self-consciously aware it’s just awareness, and that’s when if you want to understand how a spiritual master with Siddhis (powers) knows the universe, they know the universe from inside itself.”
”It was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that you’d look at another human being and say, “Here we are.” You’d see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff.”
“The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.”
“It’s as if we are born into space suits that allow us to function on this plane. We spend many years learning how to operate the suit and the superstructure of the suit is the ego. Most people forget that they were born into the suit and that they are not actually he suit.”
“The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.”
“You finally understand the message you communicate within another human being has nothing to do with what you say. It has nothing to do with the look on the musculature of your pace. It’s much deeper than that much deeper! It’s the vibrations that emanate from you!”
“As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don’t have to change them. Things just change.”
“In India, when we meet and part, we often say “Namaste”, which means: I honor the place in you where the entire Universe resides, I honor the place of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.”
“It is only when you begin to understand that if you and I are truly in love, if I go to the place in me that is love and you to the place in you that is love we are ‘together’ in love. We start to understand that what love means is that we are sharing a common state together. That state exists in you and it exists in me.”
“I think in relationships, you create an environment with your own work on yourself, which you offer to another human being to use to grow. You keep working-you become the soil-moist and soft and receptive so the person can grow the way they need to grow, because how do you know how they should grow?”
“The root of compassion is not empathy; that is kindness. Kindness is great, but it is not the ultimate compassion. Ultimate compassion relieves the suffering that comes from separateness. The suffering comes from separateness is relieved only when you are fully present with another person, not when you are separately present.”
“The questions we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization.”
“I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn’t create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.”
”You are beyond morality and yet your actions are totally moral because that’s the harmony of the universe. You see that to do anything with attachment. With desire… with anger… greed… lust… fear… is only creating more karma, which is keeping you in the game… On the wheel of birth and death. Once you see through that.. Desires can’t help but fall away.”
“After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don’t have to change them. Things just change.”
“Together we are all on a journey called life. We are a little broken and a little shattered inside. Each one of us is aspiring to make it to the end. None is deprived of pain here and we have all suffered in our own ways. I think our journey is all about healing ourselves and healing each other in our own special ways. Let’s just help each other put all those pieces back together and make it to the end more beautifully. Let us help each other survive.”
“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent… you sort of understand that it din’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgement mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

RAM DASS LOVE QUOTES

Ram Dass released his spirituality book, Be Here Now in 1971, and has sold over two million copies since its initial release. As a spiritual leader, Dass focuses on influencing people around the world to live in the present and become fully aware of their true self with inner transformation.

“I’m not interested in being a ‘lover.’ I’m interested in only being love.”
“I hang out with my guru in my heart. And I love every thing in the universe. That’s all I do all day.”
“The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.”
“Maharaj-ji, in my first darshan, my first meeting with him, showed me his powers. At that point I was impressed with the power. But subsequently, I realized that it was really his love that pulled me in. His love is unconditional love.”
“If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness. That’s the space I entered when I met my guru.”
“Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.”
“I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, ‘My god, he’s going to know all the things I don’t want people to know.’ I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.”
“You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success – none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.”
“The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it’s in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I’m caught in an unstable situation. Being in love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability. Being in love means seeing the Beloved all around me.”
“The greatest thing you can do for another being is to provide the unconditional love that comes from making contact with that place in them that is beyond conditions, which is just pure consciousness, pure essence. That is, once we acknowledge each other as existing, just being, then each of us is free to change optimally. If I can just love you because here we are, then you are free to grow as you need to grow.”

RAM DASS INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

“Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.”
“Only that in you, which is me can hear what I’m saying.”
“The next message you need is always right where you are.”
“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”
“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”
“When you are already in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to get there.”
“Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.”
“Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.”
“Start from where you are – not where you wish you were. The work you’re doing becomes your path.”
“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
“As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.”
“Pain is the mind. It’s the thoughts of the mind. Then I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being. Then those particular thoughts that are painful – love them. I love them to death!“
“When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It’s a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It’s a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.”
“Before the stroke, I was on a very spiritual plane. I ignored my body, took it for granted. When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those, I didn’t want to go anywhere near them. But the stroke reminded me that I had a body and a brain, that I had to honor them.”

RAM DASS RELATIONSHIP QUOTES

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
“We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”
“We come into relationships often very much identified with our needs. I need this, I need security, I need refuge, I need friendship. And all of relationships are symbiotic in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each others’ needs at some level or other.”
“When I used to perform weddings, the image I always had was the image of a triangle, in which there are two partners and then there is this third force, this third being, that emerges out of the interaction of these two. The third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them.”
“When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together. I see ways in which a relationship – which means something that exists between two or more people – for the most part reinforces people’s separateness as individual entities.”

RAM DASS DEATH QUOTES

“I sit with people who are dying. I’m one of those unusual types that enjoys being with someone when they’re dying because I know I am going to be in the presence of Truth.”
“Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.”
“The stroke has given me another way to serve people. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. ‘Death is perfectly safe,’ I like to say.”
“In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.”
“In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I’m just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.”