Top 300 Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make your hooks straight and nothing can hold you.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

252. “You do not tidy up a dark room. You open the windows first. Letting in the light makes everything easy. So, let us wait to improve others until we have seen ourselves as we are – and have changed.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

253. “No particular thought can be mind’s natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience, or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

254. “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.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

255. “Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

256. “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.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

257. “To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

258. “Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

259. “Exactly as the shadow appears when light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure self-awareness is obstructed by the “I am the body” idea. And as the shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land, so does the person appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find and lose, according to the pattern of destiny.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

260. “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.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

261. “As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, you seem short-lived and vulnerable, and of course you will feel anxious to survive. But when you know yourself to be beyond space and time you will be afraid no longer.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

262. “Devotion to your goal makes you live a clean and orderly life, given to search for truthand to helping people, and realization makes noble virtue easy and spontaneous, by removing for good the obstacles in the shape of desires and fears and wrong ideas .”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

263. “All worldly activities are being done for the sake of entertainment of the consciousness of every living being.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

264. “Steady faith is stronger than destiny. Destiny is the result of causes, mostly accidental, and is therefore loosely woven. Confidence and good hope will overcome it easily.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

265. “Knowledge gives power. In practice it is very simple. To control yourself, know yourself.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

266. “The scriptures say that we have our ‘karma’ and our sin and that is why we are here, but this is for the ignorant masses. One who has realized the self-knowledge ‘I am’ for him these stories are of no use.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

267. “Do not be afraid of freedom from desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting that, truly, by losing all you gain all.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

268. “The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. The world is an ocean of pain and fear, anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, coming rarely, quickly gone.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

269. “The light which you see outside arises from your own light. The light of the sun and the moon cannot be compared to the light of your Self.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

270. “Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them, that is all. There is nothing to seek or find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the “I am.” Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge or, rather, it will take you in.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

271. “How does the personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future, and your personality dissolves.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

272. “One who is afraid of time becomes a prey of time. But time itself becomes a prey of that one who is not afraid of it.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

273. “What is religion? A cloud in the sky. I live in the sky, not in the clouds, which are so many words held together. Remove the verbiage and what remains? Truth remains.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

274. “Only the people who have gone beyond the world can change the world.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

275. “It may seem arduous, but it is easy if you are earnest, and quite impossible if you are not. Everything yields to earnestness.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

276. “Until we can look at fear and accept it as the shadow of personal existence, as persons we are bound to be afraid.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

277. “When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

278. “I cried when I was born and I shall die laughing.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

279. “You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is because the universe is as it is.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

280. “You cannot be alive, for you are life itself.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

281. “If you take people to be what they think themselves to be, you will only hurt them as they hurt themselves so grievously all the time. But if you see them as they are in reality, it will do them enormous good.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

282. “To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

283. “When you are free of the world, you can do something about it. As long as you are a prisoner of it, you are helpless to change it. On the contrary, whatever you do will aggravate the situation.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

284. “What problems can there be which the mind did not create? Life and death do not create problems; pains and pleasures come and go, experienced and forgotten. It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, colored by like and dislike. Truth and love are man’s real nature, and mind and heart are the means of its expression.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

285. “We shall suffer as long as our thoughts and actions are prompted by desires and fears.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

286. “Know yourself as beyond space and time – in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable – you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are – against fear there is no other remedy.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

287. “Your true meaning cannot be grasped or captured by words. You can never be equated with any words, because you are prior to words.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

288. “Whatever you forget, is not the truth, always remember that.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

289. “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.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

290. “There is nothing impossible in the world if you are determined. The.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

291. “Stop, look, investigate, ask the right questions, come to the right conclusions and have the courage to act on them and see what happens. The first steps may bring the roof down on your head, but soon the commotion will clear and there will be peace and joy.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

292. “It is earnestness that will take you through, not cleverness – your own or another’s.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

293. “Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from; only self-knowledge can help you.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

294. “In reality, nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind, destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go – light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

295. “Things are as they are and nobody in particular is responsible. The idea of personal responsibility comes from the illusion of agency.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

296. “In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realization, the person ceases.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

297. “It is this clash between desire and fear that causes anger, which is the great destroyer of sanity in life. When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, and both become experience – painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

298. “Multiplicity without strife is joy.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

299. “When the world does not hold and bind you, it becomes an abode of joy and beauty. You can be happy in the world only when you are free of it.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

300. “When you love the Self and nothing else, you go beyond the selfish and the unselfish. All distinctions lose their meaning. Love of one and love of all merge together in love, pure and simple, addressed to none, denied to none. Stay in that love, go deeper and deeper into it, investigate yourself and love the investigation, and you will solve not only your own problems but also the problems of humanity. You will know what to do.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj