Wealth & Money Quote by Ramakrishna

A line like this lands with the quiet force of someone who’s watched desire keep remaking itself into misery. Ramakrishna isn’t scolding wealth or comfort as sins; he’s diagnosing attachment as the real trap. The key verb is “pray”: you don’t simply decide to be less hooked. You ask for help because the grip of status and security is sticky, self-justifying, and often invisible to the person held by it.

“Transitory things” does more than remind you that money can vanish. It frames wealth, reputation (“name”), and “creature comforts” as temporary scaffolding that the ego mistakes for a home. That triad is deliberate: wealth is material power, name is social power, comforts are bodily power. He’s mapping the full supply chain of craving, from public image to private habit.

The subtext is pastoral and strategic. Ramakrishna, speaking in 19th-century Bengal under colonial modernity, saw new forms of aspiration taking root: salaried respectability, upward mobility, a prestige economy tied to institutions and English education. His counsel doesn’t demand you abandon the world; it asks that the world stop owning you. “Less and less every day” is the tell: spiritual freedom is treated like a practice of gradual detachment, not a heroic renunciation.

The intent, then, is to shift the devotee’s fear: not “What if I lose these things?” but “What if I never stop needing them?” That’s how the sentence works - it turns anxiety about impermanence into a disciplined request for inner sovereignty.