Quotations on Sri Ramakrishna by distinguished personalities.

 He looked just like an ordinary man, with nothing remarkable about him. He used the most simple language, and I thought, 'Can this man be a great teacher?' I crept near him and asked him the question which I had been asking others all my life: 'Do you believe in God, sir?' 'Yes.' `How can you?' 'Because I see Him just as I see you here, only in a much more intense sense.' That impressed me at once. For the first time I found a person who dared to say that he saw God, that religion was a reality, to be felt, to be sensed in an infinitely more intense way than we can sense the world. I began to go to that man, day after day, and I actually saw that religion could be given. One touch, one glance, can change a whole life.

            -Swami Vivekananda (about his teacher Sri Ramakrishna)

"Diverse courses of worship
from varied springs of fulfillment
have mingled in your meditation.
The manifold revelation of the joy of the Infinite
has given form to a shrine of unity in your life
where from far and near arrive salutations
to which I join my own".

-Rabindranath Tagore - To the Paramahamsa Ramakrishna Deva

The story of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's life is a story of religion in practice. His life enables us to see God face to face

-Mahatma Gandhi

Ramakrishna's teachings on the essential unity of the great religions comprise Hinduism's finest voice on this topic

- Huston Smith

Sri Ramakrishna's message was unique in being expressed in action. Religion is not just a matter for study, it is something that has to be experienced and to be lived, and this is the field in which Sri Ramakrishna manifested his uniqueness. His religious activity and experience were, in fact, comprehensive to a degree that had perhaps never before been attained by any other religious genius, in India or elsewhere.

- Arnold Toynbee

Ramakrishna was a rare combination of individuality and universality, personality and impersonality. His word and example have been echoed in the hearts of Western men and women. His soul animates modern India.

- Romain Rolland

"This is the story of a phenomenon." (Isherwood's opening sentence in Ramakrishna and His Disciples.)

I will begin by calling him simply that, rather than 'holy man', 'mystic', 'saint', or 'avatar'; all emotive words with mixed associations which may attract some readers, repel others.

A phenomenon is often something extraordinary and mysterious. Ramakrishna was extraordinary and mysterious; most of all to those who were best fitted to understand him. A phenomenon is always a fact, an object of experience. That is how I shall try to approach Ramakrishna.

- Christopher Isherwood

This highly noteworthy document [The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna] conveys the personality of a great mystic in such an intimate, direct, and almost astounding manner that to read it must be an enriching experience for any intellect which is receptive and open to all things human.

- Thomas Mann

To read through these conversations in which mystical doctrine alternates with an unfamiliar kind of humor, and where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu mythology give place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality, is in itself a liberal education in humility, tolerance and suspense of judgment. We must be grateful to the translator for his excellent version of a book so curious and delightful as a biographical document, so precious, at the same time, for what it teaches us of the life of the spirit.

- Aldous Huxley (Foreword to The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna)

From Vivekananda I turned gradually to his master, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Vivekananda had made speeches, written letters, and published books which were available to the layman. But Ramakrishna, who was almost an illiterate man, had done nothing of the kind. He had lived his life and had left it to others to explain it. Nevertheless, there were books or diaries published by his disciples which gave the essence of his teachings… There was nothing new in his teaching, which is as old as Indian civilization itself, the Upanishads having taught thousands of years ago that through abandonment of worldly desires alone can immortal life be attained. The effectiveness of Ramakrishna's appeal lay, however, in the fact he had practiced what he preached and that… he had reached the acme of spiritual progress.

- Subhashchandra Bose