"Through selfless work, love of God grows in the heart. Then through his grace one realize him in course of time. God can be seen. One can talk to him as I am talking to you"
About this Quote
Ramakrishna sells mysticism with the plainspokenness of a street-corner realist. No metaphors about clouds parting or ineffable bliss; he lands the claim with a disarming domestic comparison: God can be encountered the way you encounter another person, with conversation, reciprocity, immediacy. That tonal choice is the hook. It takes what many traditions relegate to scripture or abstraction and yanks it into the realm of lived experience, as if the supernatural were simply another sense you can train.
The intent is both devotional and democratizing. He lays out a ladder: selfless work disciplines the ego, love of God becomes less performance and more appetite, grace arrives, and realization follows "in course of time". The sequence matters. It quietly undercuts spiritual consumerism and status-seeking, insisting that the breakthrough is less a heroic achievement than a byproduct of sustained self-forgetting. Agency and surrender are braided: you work, but grace seals it; you practice, but you don't purchase the result.
Subtext: the divine is not an idea to debate but a presence to cultivate. Ramakrishna was speaking into 19th-century Bengal, where colonial modernity, reform movements, and inherited ritual were all in argument. His line doubles as a rebuke to dry rationalism and mere formalism: if your religion can’t culminate in encounter, it’s incomplete. At the same time, the claim is pastoral. By insisting "as I am talking to you", he offers not proof but permission: a daring assurance that intimacy with God is not reserved for saints on pedestals, but for ordinary people willing to do the slow, ego-thinning work.
The intent is both devotional and democratizing. He lays out a ladder: selfless work disciplines the ego, love of God becomes less performance and more appetite, grace arrives, and realization follows "in course of time". The sequence matters. It quietly undercuts spiritual consumerism and status-seeking, insisting that the breakthrough is less a heroic achievement than a byproduct of sustained self-forgetting. Agency and surrender are braided: you work, but grace seals it; you practice, but you don't purchase the result.
Subtext: the divine is not an idea to debate but a presence to cultivate. Ramakrishna was speaking into 19th-century Bengal, where colonial modernity, reform movements, and inherited ritual were all in argument. His line doubles as a rebuke to dry rationalism and mere formalism: if your religion can’t culminate in encounter, it’s incomplete. At the same time, the claim is pastoral. By insisting "as I am talking to you", he offers not proof but permission: a daring assurance that intimacy with God is not reserved for saints on pedestals, but for ordinary people willing to do the slow, ego-thinning work.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
|---|
More Quotes by Ramakrishna
Add to List






