Art & Creativity Quote by Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna lands the point with a deceptively gentle turn of the knife: holy books can be packed with “good sayings,” yet a person can collect them like fortune-cookie wisdom and remain spiritually unchanged. The line draws a hard boundary between quotation and transformation. It’s a critique of religiosity as an aesthetic or intellectual hobby, a warning to the literate devotee who treats scripture as proof of seriousness rather than a demand for reorientation.

The phrasing matters. “Many good sayings” is almost dismissive, as if moral aphorisms are the least interesting thing religion has to offer. He doesn’t deny the value of sacred texts; he undercuts the modern (and not-so-modern) tendency to substitute consumption for practice. Reading becomes a proxy for virtue, a clean, controllable ritual that avoids the messier work: discipline, surrender, service, and the unsettling encounter with one’s own ego.

Context sharpens the intent. In 19th-century Bengal, Ramakrishna lived amid reformist movements, colonial education, and a growing prestige attached to textual mastery and debate. His own spirituality was famously experiential and ecstatic, oriented toward direct realization rather than doctrinal winning. So the subtext isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-performative. The real target is the comforting illusion that proximity to sacred language equals proximity to the sacred.

The quote still scans today because it names a familiar loophole: turning religion into content. You can highlight passages all day and never be touched by them. Ramakrishna insists the test is not what you can cite, but what you can become.