Renowned spiritual leader and author, Ram Dass, passed away at age 88.
Born Richard Alpert, he became an icon of the psychedelic drug movement in the ’60s and ’70s and a proponent of mindful philosophy.
Despite a successful career at Harvard’s psychology department, he was dismissed due to his research on LSD’s effects with colleague Timothy Leary.
He traveled to India in 1967 and met Hindu mystic Neem Karoli Baba, who named him Ram Dass, meaning “servant of God.”
Upon returning to the U.S., he promoted spirituality and mindfulness, wrote influential books and founded charities supporting various social causes.
Ram Dass dedicated himself to helping others, creating The Living/Dying Project for supporting conscious deaths.
Despite his growing fame, he shed the aesthetics of his spiritual persona for more relatability.
He continued teaching and spreading his message of unconditional love even after a stroke in 1997 severely impaired his mobility and speech.
Related: Masaru Emoto Quotes and Sayings on Water and Paul Brunton Quotes on Life, Meditation and Spirituality
I have listed down some of the best quotes from Ram Dass for you.
Inspirational Ram Dass Quotes on Success
1. “You have all the time in the world, but don’t waste a moment.” ~ (Ram Dass).
2. “Don’t compare your path with anybody else’s. Your path is unique to you.” ~ (Ram Dass).
3. “Be here now.” ~ (Ram Dass).
4. “I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion – and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.” ~ (Ram Dass).
5. “As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.” ~ (Ram Dass).
6. “We’re all just walking each other home.” ~ (Ram Dass).
7. “The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.” ~ (Ram Dass).
8. “The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.” ~ (Ram Dass).
9. “Suffering only shows where you are attached. That is why, to those on the path, suffering is grace.” ~ (Ram Dass).
10. “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.” ~ (Ram Dass).
11. “Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.” ~ (Ram Dass).
12. “Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.” ~ (Ram Dass).
13. “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” ~ (Ram Dass).
14. “Don’t think about the past. Just be here now.” ~ (Baba Ram Dass).
15. “Within the spiritual journey you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.” ~ (Ram Dass).
16. “Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?” ~ (Ram Dass).
17. “There is only one of us. One consciousness manifesting into different forms.” ~ (Ram Dass).
18. “The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.” ~ (Baba Ram Dass).
Popular Ram Dass Quotes
19. “Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.” ~ (Ram Dass).
20. “There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.” ~ (Ram Dass).
21. “Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.” ~ (Ram Dass).
22. “Don’t take yourself so personally.” ~ (Ram Dass).
23. “I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.” ~ (Ram Dass).
24. “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” ~ (Ram Dass).
25. “If you feel a sense of social responsibility, first of all keep working on yourself. Being peaceful yourself is the first step if you want to live in a peaceful universe.” ~ (Ram Dass).
26. “This is the pathless path. Where the journey leads is to the deepest truth in you. It is really just returning to where you were initially before you got lost.” ~ (Ram Dass).
27. “You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing.” ~ (Ram Dass).
28. “Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.” ~ (Ram Dass).
29. “A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.” ~ (Ram Dass).
30. “If I’m going to die, the best way to prepare is to quiet my mind and open my heart. If I’m going to live, the best way to prepare for it is to quiet my mind and open my heart.” ~ (Ram Dass).
31. “All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.” ~ (Ram Dass).
32. “Creativity springs from the yearning to be the fullness of who you are.” ~ (Ram Dass).
Top Ram Dass Quotes
33. “Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.” ~ (Ram Dass).
34. “Be patient. You’ll know when it’s time for you to wake up and move ahead.” ~ (Ram Dass).
35. “Turn your melodrama into a mellow drama.” ~ (Ram Dass).
36. “One of the ego’s favorite paths of resistance is to fill you with doubt.” ~ (Ram Dass).
37. “If you meditate regularly, even when you don’t feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.” ~ (Ram Dass).
38. “Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being, we are enough.” ~ (Ram Dass).
39. “Look at the people you don’t love and see them as an exercise for you to open your heart.” ~ (Ram Dass).
40. “Our thinking minds deprive us of the happiness that comes when we are living fully in the moment.” ~ (Ram Dass).
41. “The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. You merely do what you can to further your own awakening.” ~ (Ram Dass).
42. “It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.” ~ (Ram Dass).
43. “When we see the Beloved in each person, it’s like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.” ~ (Ram Dass).
44. “External silence can be the doorway to inner silence.” ~ (Ram Dass).
45. “The ego is a tool. You don’t separate it. It’s a tool for the spirit.” ~ (Ram Dass).
46. “The way we regard death is critical to the way we experience life. When your fear of death changes, the way you live your life changes.” ~ (Ram Dass).
47. “The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain – to just be with it all.” ~ (Ram Dass).
48. “The reality we live in is selected by our conceptual definitions. You and I may be in the same physical space, but each of us will see it as entirely different.” ~ (Ram Dass).
49. “You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.” ~ (Ram Dass).
50. “Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.” ~ (Ram Dass).
51. “Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death. Death scares the hell out of who you think you are, especially if you think you are this body.” ~ (Ram Dass).
52. “The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.” ~ (Ram Dass).
53. “Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.” ~ (Ram Dass).
54. “Thoughts are going by like a river; awareness simply is.” ~ (Ram Dass).
55. “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.” ~ (Ram Dass).
56. “In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.” ~ (Ram Dass).
57. “We’re fascinated by the words – but where we meet is in the silence behind them.” ~ (Ram Dass).
58. “When you see the beloved all around you, everyone is family and everywhere is love.” ~ (Ram Dass).
59. “Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.” ~ (Ram Dass).
60. “Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn’t make any difference to who you truly are.” ~ (Ram Dass).
Famous Ram Dass Quotes
61. “Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.” ~ (Ram Dass).
62. “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.” ~ (Ram Dass).
63. “The gift you offer another person is just your being.” ~ (Ram Dass).
64. “The soul is not ruled by time and space. The soul is infinite. It blends with the One in infinity.” ~ (Ram Dass).
65. “Love flows. Love doesn’t know boundaries. The mind creates boundaries. The mind creates the boundary of separate me and you. The heart just keeps embracing and opening out.” ~ (Ram Dass).
66. “Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.” ~ (Ram Dass).
67. “We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.” ~ (Ram Dass).
68. “If you want to cure the world, don’t emanate fear – emanate love.” ~ (Ram Dass).
69. “Gratitude opens your heart, and opening your heart is a wonderful and easy way for God to slip in.” ~ (Ram Dass).
70. “In meditation we can watch the itch instead of scratching it.” ~ (Ram Dass).
71. “It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.” ~ (Ram Dass).
72. “As one individual changes, the system changes.” ~ (Ram Dass).
73. “Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.” ~ (Ram Dass).
74. “I am not this body. I am in this body, and this is part of my incarnation and I honor it but that isn’t who I am.” ~ (Ram Dass).
75. “You can’t build joy on a feeling of self-loathing.” ~ (Ram Dass).
76. “All that you seek is already within you. In Hinduism it is called the Atman, in Buddhism the pure Buddha-Mind. Christ said, ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you.’ Quakers call it the ‘still small voice within.’ This is the space of full awareness that is in harmony with all the universe, and thus is wisdom itself.” ~ (Ram Dass).
77. “If you think you are free, there is no escape possible.” ~ (Ram Dass).
78. “I like to look at a tree and see that it’s love. Don’t you?” ~ (Ram Dass).
79. “If you want oneness in society, you have to teach people to go inside instead of going outside, because if they want peace, they need to find it within.” ~ (Ram Dass).
80. “Faith is what is left after all your beliefs have been blown to hell.” ~ (Ram Dass).
Short Ram Dass Quotes
81. “The soul is not part of the incarnation. It comes into the incarnation. And the soul is not afraid of death because it has done it so many times.” ~ (Ram Dass).
82. “We’re sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine!” ~ (Ram Dass).
83. “Let’s trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let’s lay down our righteousness and just be together.” ~ (Ram Dass).
84. “Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.” ~ (Ram Dass).
85. “If you rest in the silence inside, all those you meet will have their spiritual hearts resuscitated.” ~ (Ram Dass).
86. “Inspiration is God making contact with itself.” ~ (Ram Dass).
87. “The person who says, ‘I’m enlightened’ probably isn’t.” ~ (Ram Dass).
88. “We’ve gotten lost in our Ego and have forgotten that our Soul’s only motive is to merge with the Beloved.” ~ (Ram Dass).
89. “Until we know that we can bear the unbearable, we’re always running scared.” ~ (Ram Dass).
90. “Our culture’s zeal for longevity reveals our incredible collective fear of death.” ~ (Ram Dass).
91. “Nature is really important because it’s a manifestation of love that hasn’t been run through human minds.” ~ (Ram Dass).
92. “I love everybody and they, in turn, love everybody, and that’s spreading love heart to heart to heart. That’s my approach of my work.” ~ (Ram Dass).
93. “Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.” ~ (Ram Dass).
94. “When you are completely identified with your thinking mind you are totally separate from everything else in the universe.” ~ (Ram Dass).
Best Ram Dass Quotes
95. “Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.” ~ (Ram Dass).
96. “We kill each other over which name to call the Nameless.” ~ (Ram Dass).
97. “I’ve got to love the souls of people. Because I can’t love every incarnation. To love their souls, I have to identify with my own soul.” ~ (Ram Dass).
98. “When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn’t.” ~ (Ram Dass).
99. “When the heart is open, it’s easier for the mind to be turned toward God.” ~ (Ram Dass).
100. “Wisdom is one of the few things in human life that does not diminish with age.” ~ (Ram Dass).
101. “I don’t really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.” ~ (Ram Dass).
102. “As you look at many people’s lives, you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying, for they are comfortable in it. They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.” ~ (Ram Dass).
Inspiring Ram Dass Quotes
103. “Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.” ~ (Ram Dass).
104. “The next message you need is always right where you are.” ~ (Ram Dass).
105. “To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.” ~ (Ram Dass).
106. “Give it all up and you can have it all.” ~ (Ram Dass).
107. “It’s very hard to grow, because it’s difficult to let go of the models of ourselves in which we’ve invested so heavily.” ~ (Ram Dass).
108. “Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.” ~ (Ram Dass).
109. “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.” ~ (Ram Dass).
110. “The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening.” ~ (Ram Dass).
111. “When we’re identified with Awareness, we’re no longer living in a world of polarities. Everything is present at the same time.” ~ (Ram Dass).
