Parenting & Family Quote by Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna is aiming a blade at the softest idol in the room: the family as spiritual alibi. The line is intentionally extreme because it’s meant as diagnosis, not advice for polite domestic life. In his devotional world, “physical attraction” isn’t just lust; it’s the whole sticky bundle of possessiveness, preference, and ego that masquerades as care. The quote works by refusing to flatter ordinary affection. It suggests that what we call love for spouse, child, friend often contains an anxious need to be needed, to own, to secure a self through others.

The rhetorical force comes from the swap he proposes: attachment becomes compassion. Compassion is cooler, less flattering, and harder to counterfeit. It doesn’t demand reciprocity; it doesn’t panic at loss; it doesn’t turn intimacy into a contract. For a 19th-century Bengali mystic speaking within Hindu bhakti and renunciation traditions, this isn’t misogyny or misanthropy so much as an attempt to re-route emotion away from the household economy of obligation and toward the divine. Ramakrishna lived amid intense debates about worldly duty versus monastic ideal, and he dramatized the monastic claim: ultimate reality can’t be added on top of ordinary craving; it displaces it.

The subtext is unsettling on purpose. If devotion is real, it should reorganize your nervous system. You may still feed your child, honor your spouse, show up for friends, but the engine has changed: not hunger, not preference, not “mine,” just a steady concern for suffering. That’s less romantic than love, and that’s the point.