137 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening To Inspire Love And Joy

So you’ve been told there is more to life than what you can perceive with your senses, and you’ve even had moments when you’ve experienced it for yourself.

Perhaps you were admiring the sunset on an idle summer night, or maybe you were alone sitting on your bed, but you felt it. You felt a subtle expansiveness of peace. Where your problems seemed foreign and you saw life with pristine clarity.

Sometimes you’ll feel it unexpectedly. Its underlying current rises within you, permeating everything you do, from the menial to the meaningful. But soon enough, you forget again.

And each time the feeling subsides, you feel like a part of you left with it.

Until it comes once more, maybe it’s weeks, months, or even years. But when it returns, it’s as if it never left. You know the feeling intimately like an old friend. But then you always forget—time after time.

The going and froing of life get in the way. Your mind tells you there are more important things that demand your attention, so you forget, and life no longer seems simple.

How to stop this loop of forgetting? How to make the peaceful awareness last longer?

Reading quotes on spiritual awakening help.

After I finish my meditation practice, I read five quotes from this list, taking time to contemplate the words deeply. Quotes on spiritual awakening keep me motivated and inspired to keep digging towards my essential nature.

I started adding to this list about five years ago. Whenever I came across a quote that inspired me, I’d write it in a google doc.

I’ll continue adding to the list as I find new quotes and new teachers. You’ll find many quotes from the great Indian mystic Sadhguru as well as the popular spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle (who, like Baby Yoda, is both wise and cute). Who have been big influences on me throughout the years. Among others, you’ll also find quotes from the master of self-enquiry Ramana Maharshi, the British Jamaican guru Mooji, and the spiritual rascal Alan Watts.

Feel free to bookmark this page and return to it whenever need to create space around your thoughts.

Here’s the lowdown 👇

💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening To Inspire Love And Joy
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening That Provide Perspective On Life
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening That Define The Spiritual Journey
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening To Inspire A Spiritual Life
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening And The Mischief Of The Mind
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening And The Nature Of The Ego
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening And The Pitfalls Of Knowledge
💡 Quotes On Spiritual Awakening That Point To Who You Really Are

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening To Inspire Love And Joy

_{“I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect.” – Hermann Hesse}

_{“If you can look at everything lovingly the whole world explodes into a beautiful phenomenon for you. Love is not something you do, it is the way that you are.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” – Alan Watts}

_{“It is love alone that can solve all our human problems.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“If you love, you may do what you will. But if you start by doing what you will, or by doing what you don’t will in obedience to some traditional system or notions, ideals and prohibitions, you will never love.” – Aldous Huxley}

_{“It is only when we know how to love each other that there can be cooperation, that there can be intelligent functioning, a coming together over any question.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“You cannot build goodwill, you have to exude goodwill. If you offer it to everybody, then it comes back to you in many ways. But don’t worry if it comes back to you or not. This should be your way of living. This should your way of being that you naturally include everybody in everything that you are. Some will respond, some will not respond and it’s fine. It’s their choice. But as far as you’re concerned, there’s no choice. You have fallen in love with everybody. For them, they can choose still. But after some time, they’ll lose their choice. They’ll have no choice. If you continue like this, you will see after some time, they have no choice at all. Initially, they act like they have a choice. But after a while, they’ll have no choice. So, emotion is a powerful tool. So, if you manage a steady sweetness of your emotion, you are in love with everything around you. If you like this people can’t help it. They’ll fall.” – Sadhguru}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening That Provide Perspective On Life

_{“Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything which might lift them out of that false serenity.” – Frank Herbert}

_{“Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Your sense of happiness is based on everyone else doing worse than you. What kind of life is that?” – Sadhguru}

_{“Most people tiptoe through life hoping they make it safely to death.” – Earl Nightingale}

_{“Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“As time goes on people become puppets of their accumulated past.” – Sadhguru}

_{“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after a wind.” – Ecclesiastes}

_{“Pleasure is always derived from something outside of you, whereas joy arises from within.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“What, at this moment, is lacking?” – Rinzai Zen}

_{“Next time you say, “I have nothing in common with this person,” remember that you have a great deal in common: A few years from now – two years or seventy years, it doesn’t make much difference – both of you will have become rotting corpses, then piles of dust, then nothing at all. This is a sobering and humbling realisation that leaves little room for pride.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“If you sit there with this attitude of getting something, you will only gather more.” – Sadhguru}

_{“For those who have, more will be given. For those who have little, even that will be taken away.” – Jesus}

_{“It is not the content of your life that matters. It is the context of your life that does.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Your happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“We act in order to express our fulfilment, not to acquire it. We act in order to celebrate our inner completeness, not to pursue it. For most people, however, this simple equation is reversed. Most people do in order to be. They act because they feel incomplete. Their action is prompted by a desire to acquire something or to enhance their identity in some way. This is the ancient hunter-gatherer impulse, which still endures in human beings. It is the need to act in order to accumulate – whether physical, emotional, or intellectual satisfaction. It is action impelled by a desire to augment themselves, to become more than what they are. They act in order to have, they have in order to be. This is tragic.” – Sadhguru}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening That Define The Spiritual Journey

_{“To be spiritual means to be an emperor within yourself.” – Sadhguru}

_{“If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The mind knows nothing of where this is going.” – Mooji}

_{“What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“We must not utilize time as a means of attaining, realizing, apprehending the timeless. That is what we are doing most of our lives: spending time in trying to grasp that which is timeless.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“The word “Yoga” means union. Human beings are trying to experience this sense of union in so many ways. If it finds a very basic expression, we call it sexuality. If it finds an emotional expression, it gets labelled as greed, ambition, conquest, or simply shopping. If it finds a conscious expression, we call it Yoga. But the fundamental process and longing are the same. That is, you want to include something that is not you as a part of yourself. You want to obliterate the distance or the boundaries between you and the other.” – Sadhguru}

_{“We know that the human body will purify (and also heal) itself when given the opportunity. This happens during rest. It also happens whenever normal loads are taken off the body or mind. Fasting has been to produce purifying effects in the body. Pranayama is a kind of fasting, involving air – and is found to produce physical effects. Meditation is also a kind of fasting, involving thinking – systematically allowing the mind to become still. We don’t force the mind to stillness. It just happens automatically when the right conditions are set up in the mind. Generally, purification happens in the body when we allow something to reduce or stop – food, air, thoughts, metabolism, etc. When any or all of these come to be less, or completely at rest, then purification happens.” – Yogani}

_{“Your seeking actually is not such a unique private seeking. It’s a movement from the entire universe. Just like a wave – a wave cannot decide, “Guys I think I’m going to go this way instead today. I’ll catch you later.” He cannot. Every movement of each wave has the total ocean behind it. Your wishing to wake up is a universal movement.” – Mooji}

_{“When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“If you don’t do anything it will happen. But right now you are in states where it is impossible to do nothing. Try spending a day without doing anything. You’ve never had a day like this. No technology, no socialising, nothing. No movement. No thinking. You will meet God then. We are occupied with doing. So to bring you to a state where you can do nothing. You will have to do many things.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Eagerness to do it must be equal to that of a man kept underwater trying to rise up to the surface for his life.” – Mooji}

_{“If there is enlightenment, it is to be found today. As long as we do practices for the future, enlightenment will remain in the future. If we do practices for happiness today and tomorrow, then enlightenment is suddenly much closer. Do your sitting practice, however much and whatever kind you find is good for you, and then go do something good for someone. That is rising enlightenment. Claim enlightenment today by doing practices and then giving away your silence and your bliss to others. Getting enlightenment is giving it away. Getting enlightenment is letting it go.” – Yogani}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening To Inspire A Spiritual Life

_{“If we do not have the power to keep our minds the way we want it, what we create in the world is also going to be accidental and haphazard. So learning to create our minds the way we want is the basis of creating the world the way we want.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action – just give attention to the action itself.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Never look up to anyone. Never look down on anyone.” – Sadhguru}

_{“If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“If your attention is on all the time without any kind of judgements – simply attention, not thought, just attention – you will naturally become intuitive.” – Sadhguru}

_{“How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of your attachment to things.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“What happens within me must happen my way. Whatever is around me isn’t all mine. Everyone has their piece in it. Maybe I also have a piece. I can push for a bigger piece, but that’s it. There is never going to be a time for every human being where the external situations will be 100% the way you want it. It will never ever happen, but within me must be 100% the way I want otherwise I’m a lost cause.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Westerners are rajasic (mentally overactive) and their energy goes outwards. We must be inwardly quiet, not forgetting the Self, and then externally we can go on with activity. 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}

_{“Whenever you are waiting, wherever it may be, use that time to feel the inner body. In this way, traffic jams and lines become very enjoyable. Instead of mentally projecting yourself away from the Now, go more deeply into the Now by going more deeply into the body.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“When listening to another person, don’t just listen with your mind, listen with your whole body. Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen. That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering. You are giving the other person space – space to be. It is the most precious gift you can give.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Consciousness is not a matter of behaviour. It is the nature of existence. Compulsiveness, however, is behavioural. The moment you wait before you engage in a compulsion, you are aligning yourself with the conscious nature of existence. Over time, this helps weaken the compulsive nature of your behaviour.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn’t, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{Forgive them, for they know not what they do. – Jesus}

_{“A spiritual person is one who has found action in inaction, and in-action in action.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The spine is not merely a collection of bones. It is the very basis of communication and perception within the human system. Keeping it in optimal condition will not just revitalise and rejuvenate the body but will make a phenomenal difference in your mental and emotional life and the way you function.” – Sadhguru}

_{“It is important to operate out of a state of inner fulfilment rather than inner hankering. Once this is accomplished, your life becomes an expression of bliss, not a pursuit of it. Your desire does not evaporate; instead, it becomes conscious. Your desire is no longer the unconscious fuel for your personal identity. It is the conscious tool by which you function. You will now desire the well-being of the entire planet. The crux of the matter, therefore, is identification with your desires. When you are no longer identified with your desires when there is a distance between you and your mind you simply do what is needed for the moment and for the situation. You learn to play with desire. The desires are no longer about “you” anymore. Now your karmic bondage vanishes entirely.” – Sadhguru}

_{“If you want to be self-propelled, it is important to start by fixing your intention. Make your intention as all-encompassing as you can. Start with a simple resolve. Decide to be a Mother to the World. That means seeing everyone as your own. There is no one who is not part of your clan. When you walk down the street, are you capable of looking upon everyone with the same sweetness of emotion that arises within you when you see your child coming home from school? This intention alone could liberate you from much agitation and negativity and could have a tremendous impact on how you craft your destiny. If you are conscious every moment that everything and everyone on this planet is yours, you do not need any laws to tell you what you shall or shall not do. You have changed your fundamental identity. Your karmic boundaries now fall away and you experience a sense of boundlessness. A new identity of inclusiveness and involvement is born.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Keep the remembrance of your real nature alive, even while working, and avoid haste which causes you to forget. Be deliberate. Practice meditation to still the mind and cause it to become aware of its true relationship to the Self which supports it. Do not imagine it is you who is doing the work. Think that it is the underlying current that is doing it. Identify yourself with the current. If you work unhurriedly, recollected, your work or service need not be a hindrance.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“As the activities of the wise man only exist in the eyes of others and not in his own, although he may be accomplishing immense tasks, he really does nothing. Therefore his activities do not stand in the way of inactions and peace of mind. For he knows the truth that all activities take place in his mere presence and that he does nothing. Hence he will remain as the silent witness of all the activities taking place.” – Ramana Maharshi}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening And The Mischief Of The Mind

_{“You exist as an idea in your mind.” – Shunryu Suzuki}

_{“What a liberation to realise that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Our thoughts block out life like a big cloud. Then we don’t experience life. We only experience thoughts, emotions, ideas, and prejudices.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The mind in itself is not dysfunctional. It is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek yourself in it and mistake it for who you are. It then becomes the egoic mind and takes over your whole life.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare}

_{“When you realise that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.” – Budai}

_{“Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Where is your escape button? The thoughts do not exist! No! Cut all of it. Bang. Wake up.” – Mooji}

_{“Take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The idea is the result of the thought process, the thought process is the response of memory, and memory is always conditioned.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That’s why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“As soon as the mind and mind identification return, you are no longer yourself but a mental image of yourself, and you start playing games and roles again to get your ego needs met. You are a human mind again, pretending to be a human being” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Whatever happens in the mind immediately imprints itself on the body as a chemical process.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Pleasure or pain are aspects of the mind only. Our essential nature is happiness. But we have forgotten the Self and imagine that the body or the mind is the Self. It is that wrong identity that gives rise to misery. What is to be done? This mental tendency is very ancient and has continued for innumerable past births. Hence it has grown strong. That must go before the essential nature, happiness asserts itself.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened your become to your reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“People say, “Oh, I’m not doing so well at the moment.” Stop that. That’s not true. Don’t judge yourself with your thoughts. You’re not your thoughts. But when they come and you hold onto them, you create a relationship and an identity with them, and of course, you’re going to feel like you’re not doing very well because no thought is doing particularly well. They keep changing. Even a nice one after a while goes into some silly place or something. So it’s good to be aware of thought. Make use of them also, but keep your royal distance from them. Yourself is not a thought. That is 100% sure.” – Mooji}

_{“If you realise you’re actually stupid that you don’t know anything in this existence. Then you can simply look at life with a great sense of wonder without a thought appearing in your mind. If you think you’re smart about everything. You’ve got explanations and calculations and nonsense going on in your head. If you see one thing, a thousand thoughts will go off. Isn’t it? You are not sitting here in this Satsang totally silent. You are agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, making comments within yourself. Because the moment you think there is some value to what you think, then you can’t stop it. There is no way to stop it. It’ll just go on and on and on. When you see there is absolutely no life value to your thought process, it is just memory recycling itself. It’s just the same old nonsense recycling itself, but if you’re enamoured by this recycling. If you think it’s great, you cannot stop it. If you see the patterns of what it is. If you see the stupidity of what it is. Then slowly you will distance yourself and it will collapse because without attention it cannot go on.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Thought is memory and memory is accumulated responses and so thought is always conditioned however much it may imagine it is free. Thought is mechanical, tied to the centre of its own knowledge. The distance thought covers depends on knowledge and knowledge is always the remains of yesterday, of the movement that’s gone. Thought can project itself into the fixture but it is tied to yesterday. Thought builds its own prison and lives in it, whether it’s in the fixture or in the past, gilded or plain. Thought can never be still, by its very nature it is restless, ever pushing and withdrawing. The machinery of thought is ever in motion, noisily or quietly, on the surface or hidden. It cannot wear itself out. Thought can refine itself, control its wanderings; can choose its own direction and conform to environment. Thought cannot go beyond itself; it may function in narrow or wide fields but it will always be within the limitation of memory and memory is always limited. Memory must die psychologically, inwardly, but function only outwardly. Inwardly, there must be death and outwardly sensitivity to every challenge and response. The inward concern of thought perverts action.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening And The Nature Of The Ego

_{“I don’t have enough yet,” by which the ego really means, “I am not enough yet.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“A powerful spiritual practice is consciously to allow the diminishment of ego when it happens without attempting to restore it.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Whatever behaviour the ego manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for more. And, of course, the need to feel a sense of separation, that is to say, the need for opposition, enemies.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Live your life beyond your ambitions. Your stupid ambitions have come to you because of a limited society in which you are living, based on that, if you’re one step ahead of your neighbour, your ambitions are realised. No no no. I want to be the richest man in the United States. It is still among the lame. Among the lame you are champion. That is all.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of the ego.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“One should act without thinking that oneself is the actor. Actions will go on even in the egoless state. Each person has come into manifestation for a certain purpose and their purpose will be accomplished whether he considers himself to be the actor or not.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“For me, living well is if you are able to sit here in such a way that nothing matters; whether you have something or not, even whether there is food or not, it does not matter to you. You are just fine. It is not that you are incapable of earning your food and other things, but that does not decide who you are right now. What kind of garment you are wearing does not decide who you are right now. What kind of house you are living in does not decide who you are right now. How someone else treats you does not decide who you are right now. What someone says to you does not decide who you are right now. How you are looked up to or down upon does not decide who you are right now. If you are like this, you are living well for sure. Wherever you sit, your experience of life is beautiful.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ – and find that there is no death.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“How is the ego to be destroyed? Hold the ego first and then ask how is to be destroyed. Who asks the question? It is the ego. This question is a sure way to cherish the ego and not to kill it. If you seek the ego you will find that it does not exist. That is the way to destroy it.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The history of communism, originally inspired by noble ideals, clearly illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality – create a new earth – without any prior change in their inner reality, their state of consciousness. They make plans without taking into account the blueprint for dysfunction that every human carries within: the ego.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The natives of North America found ownership of land an incomprehensible concept. And so they lost it when the Europeans made them sign pieces of paper that were equally incomprehensible to them. They felt they belonged to the land, but the land did not belong to them. The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The way in which you speak to the chairman of the company may be different in subtle ways from how you speak to the janitor. How you speak to a child may be different from how you speak to an adult. Why is that? You are playing roles. You are not yourself, neither with the chairman nor with the janitor or the child.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“You have simply no business in torturing this being.” – Sadhguru}

_{“At night a man may imagine that there is a ghost by his side because of the play of shadows. If he looks closely he discovers that the ghost is not really there, and what he imagined to be a ghost was merely a tree or a post. If he does not look closely the ghost may terrify him. All that is required is to look closely and the ghost vanishes. The ghost was never there. So also with the ego. It is an intangible link between the body and pure consciousness. It is not real. So long as one does not look closely at it, it continues to give trouble. But when one looks for it, it is found not to exist.” – Ramana Maharshi}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening And The Pitfalls Of Knowledge

_{“A 12-year-old knows the name of the galaxy up there. A trillion light years away which is not good for him because this is not knowledge. This is not of any usefulness. This is only for boastfulness. And above all, it’ll take away your ability to pay attention. Because the basis of attention is you realise that you do not know even a speck in the universe properly.”- Sadhguru}

_{“Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.” – Alan Watts}

_{“While knowledge is communicable, wisdom is not.” – Herman Hesse}

_{“A mind is made dull by the weight of knowledge.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“What we call knowledge refers to frozen, accumulated memory. Knowing, on the other hand, is a dynamic process; it is living wisdom, not dead information. Instead of tending to the root, Adam and Eve grew fascinated by the fruit, they began to fixate on the succulence of the end product. They began choosing product over process, destination over journey, karma over yoga, knowledge over knowing. They were so beguiled by the consequences of their actions that they began to see life as a means to an end. This is sadly a reductive way to live life. For as soon as you seek to freeze or grasp or manipulate the great roaring cascade of life, you have to stand apart from it. The moment you stand apart, you create divisions; between root, stem, and fruit; between past, present, and future. Now you have the birth of time. And with this, bondage begins.” – Sadhguru}

_{“The total denial of the known is the essence of freedom.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“It’s with knowledge that the trap begins.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Human beings now moved from a pristine intelligence to memory that projects itself as intelligence. They journeyed from intelligence to intellect, and from consciousness to self-consciousness.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Give up all you have read and heard and just BE.” – Nisargadatta Maharaj}

_{“Our problems – social, environmental, political, religious – are so complex that we can solve them only by being simple, not by becoming extraordinarily erudite and clever. A simple person sees much more directly, has a more direct experience than the complex person. Our minds are so crowded with an infinite knowledge of facts, of what others have said, that we have become incapable of being simple and having direct experiences ourselves.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti}

_{“Idiots are always dead sure about anything. You see the confidence in which the idiots walk about in the world?” – Sadhguru}

_{“There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog.” – Alan Watts}

_{“The finger-pointing to the moon is not the moon.” – Thich Nhat Hanh}

_{“If you look at yourself in the contract of Creation as a whole, you are nothing. If you understand that you are nothing, you will be only too glad that things are happening to whatever extent they are. You will be too glad that when you are a bloody nothing – when you don’t know one thing from another, when you are sitting on this planet, in the middle of nowhere, in this vast existence – at least you are breathing, your heart is beating, you are living and everything is working out well. You don’t know anything, nor can you control it, nor can you manage it, but still it is happening well. So if you understand the real context of life, you would only be too glad to be alive.” – Sadhguru}

_{“Though you cannot see your own eyes and though not provided with a mirror to look in, do you deny the existence of your eyes? Similarly, you are aware of the Self even though the Self is not objectified. Or, do you deny the Self because it is not objectified? When you say, ‘I cannot know the Self’, it means absence in terms of relative knowledge because you have been so accustomed to relative knowledge that you identify yourself with it. Such wrong identity has forged the difficulty of not knowing the obvious Self because it cannot be objectified. And then you ask, ‘how is one to know the Self?’” – Ramana Maharshi}

Quotes On Spiritual Awakening That Point To Who You Really Are

_{“Forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy. The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one were trying to describe the colour of a mirror in terms of colours reflected in the mirror.” – Alan Watts}

_{“The seed of physicality that was transmitted by our parents has a certain set of rules, traits, and compulsions of its own. This aspect of Nature only tries to survive. The survival process includes procreation. It always tries to avoid everything that threatens its survival. Now, our parents gave us just a seed and that became the body. But what the Source of Creation gave us was not a seed in that sense. It gave itself. This is the reason that all the possibilities that the Source of Creation holds are kind of encapsulated in us. Whether that possibility is realised in an individual life or not is questionable, but the possibility is always there.” – Sadhguru}

_{“You have been so accustomed to objectivity that you have lost the knowledge of yourself, simply because the Self cannot be objectified. You are the Self, yet you ask how to know the Self.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“It is the elusive ‘life’ that no scientist has ever found because the consciousness that is looking for it is it.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Our consciousness is the source of bliss. Our consciousness is bliss. No one has to take my word for it. As we meditate each day, we gradually come to know what pure bliss consciousness is. As the psalm says, “Be still, and know I am God.”” – Yogani}

_{“We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” – Alan Watts}

_{“The present difficulty is that man thinks he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the higher power that does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles, otherwise, he courts them.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“It’s like if you imagine there’s a great book. A great fiction. All these characters are in there. Every kind of character is in this book. Do you think that these characters are planning a secret meeting to protest against their author? Without their author knowing?” – Mooji}

_{“What you see and experience is not in the event or situation but in you.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The source of creation is the highest form of intelligence.” – Sadhguru}

_{“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and all wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they disappear.” – Alan Watts}

_{“Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the sun hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there on the other side of the clouds.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“I leave my human nature to unfold according to its destiny. I remain as I AM.” – Nisargadatta Maharaj}

_{“It is not we who create, but universal intelligence that creates through us.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“The one has become many through the process of identified perception.” – Yogani}

_{“Jnani (the enlightened) dream, but he knows it to be a dream, in the same way as he knows the waking state to be a dream. You may call them dream no.1 and dream no.2. The jnani being established in the fourth state – turiya, the supreme reality – he detachedly witnesses the three other states, waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep, as pictures superimposed on it.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“The unmanifested flows into this dimension as awareness, inner space, Presence. How does it do that? Through the human form that becomes conscious and thus fulfils its destiny. The human form was created for this higher purpose, and millions of other forms prepared the ground for it.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“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 of 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}

_{“In every direction, there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek.” – Alan Watts}

_{“What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of that One Life deep within yourself and within all creatures. To be it. Therefore, all love is the love of God.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Your duty is to be, and not to be this or that. ‘I am that am’ sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in words, ‘be still’. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause of trouble. Give up the notion that ‘I am so and so’. All that is required to realise the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow. It only reveals itself to you when you are present. Could it be this nameless essence and your presence are one and the same? Would it be there without your presence? Go deeply into it. Find out for yourself.” – Eckhart Tolle}

_{“Misery is due to the perception of objects. If they are not there, there will be no contingent thoughts and so misery is wiped off. And objects are only mental creations. They have no substantive being. Investigate the matter and ascertain the truth of the statement. The result will be the conclusion that the objective world is in the subjective consciousness. The Self is thus the only reality that permeates and also envelops the world. Since there is no duality, no thoughts will arise to disturb your peace. This is realisation of the Self. The Self is eternal and so also is realisation.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“The world requires location for its existence and light to make it perceptible. Both rise simultaneously. Therefore physical existence and perception depend upon the light of the mind which is reflected from the Self. Just as cinema pictures can be made visible by a reflected light, and only in darkness, so also the world pictures are perceptible only by the light of the Self reflected in the darkness of ignorance. The world can be seen neither in the utter darkness of ignorance, as in deep sleep, nor in the utter light of the Self, as in Self-realisation or samadhi.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“Take the instance of moving pictures on the screen in the cinema show. What is there in front of you before the play begins? Merely the screen. On that screen, you see the entire show, and for all appearances the pictures are real. But go and try to take hold of them. What do you take hold of? Merely the screen on which the pictures appeared. After the play, when the pictures disappear, what remains? The screen again. So with the Self. That alone exists, the pictures come and go. If you hold on to the Self, you will not be deceived by the appearance of the pictures. Nor does it matter at all if the pictures appear or disappear. Ignoring the Self the ajnani (the unenlightened) thinks the world is real, just as ignoring the screen he sees merely pictures as if they existed apart from it. If one knows that without the screen, one is not deluded. The jnani knows that the screen and the pictures are only the Self. With the pictures the Self is in its manifest form; without the pictures, it remains in the unmanifest form.” – Ramana Maharshi}

_{“Are you in the world, or is the world within you? You must admit that the world is not perceived in your sleep although you cannot deny your existence then. The world appears when you wake up. So where is it? Clearly, the world is your thought. Thoughts are your projections. The ‘I’ is first created and then the world. The world is created by the ‘I’ which in its turn rises up from the Self. The riddle of the creation of the world is thus solved if you solve the creation of the ‘I’. So to say, find your Self. Again, does the world come and ask you, “Why do ‘I’ exist?” How was ‘I’ created? It is you who ask the question. The questioner must establish the relationship between the world and himself. He must admit that the world is his own imagination. Who imagines it? Let me again find the ‘I’ and then the Self. Moreover, all the scientific and theological explanations do not harmonise. The diversities in such theories clearly show the uselessness of seeking such explanations. Such explanations are purely mental or intellectual and nothing more. Still, all of them are true according to the standpoint of the individual. There is no creation in the state of realisation. When one sees the world, one does not see oneself. When one sees the Self, the world is not seen. So see the Self and realise that there has been no creation.” – Ramana Maharshi}

So there you have it. 137 quotes on spiritual awakening.
What are some of your favourite quotes on spiritual awakening?
Let me know down in the comments.

All the love,
Max

Further reading:

• How To Enjoy Life (And Stop Chasing Waterfalls)
• 5 Meditations To Transform Life From Bumbling To Blissful
• How To Overcome The Greatest Obstacle To A Spiritual Life
• How Spirituality Can Take On Climate Change