Adi Shankaracharya Sayings and Quotes

1. When the force of the desire for the Truth blossoms, selfish desires wither away, just like darkness vanishes before the radiance of the light of dawn.
    
2. Reality can be experienced only with the eye of understanding, not just by a scholar. What the moon is like must be seen with one's own eyes. How can others do it for you?
    
3. When by the effect of constant meditation, the purified mind becomes one with God, then samadhi, now freed from images, experiences in itself the state of non-dual bliss.
    
4. When youth is gone, where is lust and its play? Where is the lake when its waters have dried up? Where are the kinsfolk when riches are gone ? When Truth is realised, where is the snare of Samsara(world)?
    
5. Do not look at anybody in terms of friend or foe, brother or cousin; do not fritter away your mental energies in thoughts of friendship or enemity. Seeking the Self everywhere, be amiable and equal-minded towards all, treating all alike.
    
6. Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.
    
7. In you, in me and everywhere, there is but the one Vishnu, Mistakenly viewing me with a sense of difference, you are ill-disposed towards me. Try to see in all beings only the Vishnu who is your own self. Give up your false and egoistic sense of separateness from other beings. Cultivate a sense of kinship, unity and oneness with all.
    
8. It is owing to people's worldly desires, their desires for scriptures, and their desires concerning their bodies that they do not achieve realisation.
    
9. Only he who is free from the terrible hankering after the senses which is so hard to overcome is fit for liberation, and no-one else, not even if he is an expert in the six branches of scripture.
    
10. Liberation is achieved not by observances or by analysis, nor by deeds or learning, but only by the realisation of one's oneness with God, and by no other means.
     
11. As readily as one takes to indulging in carnal pleasures, with the same readiness alas! he is taken over by disease too. Even seeing death as the inevitable and only end of all, man does not refrain from sinful ways.