Ramakrishna Quotes

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.

Man proposes, but God disposes.

I believe very confidently in the truth of Scripture, where it says that there is no authority, no power given to man except as given by God.

The good pleasure of God is an act of the divine will freely and effectively determining all things.

If we incline our wills in true earnest singleness to God, then we go with Christ out of this world, out from the stars and elements, and enter into God; for in the will of reason we are children of the stars and elements, and the spirit of this world ruleth over us.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

The Ego is partly free. partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God.

The first thing that we need to say is that God is grieving, too. Uh, a lot of people try to make it sound like 'well everything that happens is God's will.' That's nonsense. God allows everything, but God does not choose everything.

Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or worship and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God's most precious will. . . . There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this its power and strength.

Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.

God got the power, man has got his vanity. Man gotta choose before God can set him free.

God is not obligated to anoint what He does not initiate.

The devil has no power over us only as we permit him. The moment we revolt at anything which comes from God, the devil takes power.

I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God.

Only if you are joyful, you can be free from the fruit of action.

The genius of Christian spirituality is to integrate [the] spirit of possession with the spirit of dispossession. The spirit of dispossession implies that all the good and delightful things of this world are never allowed to own, possess, or shackle me. Dispossession implies that I am always free, my own person, liberated from the tyranny that possession can easily exercise over us.

Man does what he can, and God what he will.

If by fate anyone means the will or power of God, let him keep his meaning but mend his language; for fate commonly means a necessary process which will have its way apart from the will of God and men.

Free-will doctrine-what does it? It magnifies man into God. It declares God's purposes a nullity, since they cannot be carried out unless men are willing. It makes God's will a waiting servant to the will of man, and the whole covenant of grace dependent on human action. Denying election on the ground of injustice, it holds God to be a debtor to sinners.

God’s sovereign will is not at the whim and mercy of our person and individual responses to it.

God demands nothing less than self - surrender as the price for the only real freedom that is worth having.

It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them.