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21. Sri Ramakrishna

  1. Sri Ramakrishna's life is a search light of infinite power thrown upon the whole mass of Indian religious thought. He was the living commentary to the Vedas and to their aim. He had lived in one life the whole cycle of the national religious existence in India. He is the latest and the most perfect - the concentrated embodiment of knowledge, love, renunciation, catholicity, and the desire to serve mankind.

  2. Sri Bhagavan Ramakrishna, is the reformed and remodelled manifestation of all the past great epoch makers in religion. He lived to root out all the distinction between man and woman, between the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, Brahmins and Chandalas. And he was the harbinger of peace - the separation between Hindus and Mohammedans, between Hindus and Christians, all are now thing of the past. His life and his teachings are to be spread far and wide, are to be made to penetrate every pore of Hindu society. This new dispensation of the age is the source of great good to the whole world, especially to India.

  3. If you speak kind words to boys and encourage them they are bound to improve in time. If you can give them positive ideas, people will grow up to be men and learn to stand on their own legs. In language and literature, in poetry and the arts, in everything we must point out not the mistakes that people are making in their thought and actions,  but the way in which they will gradually be able to do this things better.

  4. This is the message of Sri Ramakrishna to the modern world: "Do not care for doctrines, do not care for dogmas or sects, or churches, or temples; they count for little compared with the essence of existence in each man, which is spiritually; and the more this is developed in a man, the more powerful is he for good. Earn that first, acquire that, and criticise no one, for all doctrines and creed have some good in them.

  5. Pointing out mistakes wounds a man's feelings. We have seen how Sri Ramakrishna would encourage even those whom we considered as worthless and change the very course of their lives thereby! His very method of teaching was a unique phenomenon. He never destroyed a single man's special inclinations. He gave words of hope and encouragement even to the most degraded of person and lifted them up, we too must follow in his footsteps and lift all up and rouse them.

  6. "..... this man woke up in the dead of night, entered surreptitiously the house of this Pariah, cleansed his latrine, and with his long hair wiped the place, and that he did day after day in order that he might make himself the servant of all. I bean the fee of that man on my head; he is my hero; that hero's life I will try to imitate."
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