Quotations of Adi Shankaracharya

1. Recognising one's true inner self, the witness of the mind and its operations, and reflecting on the truth of "I am That", get rid of this wrong opinion about oneself.
    
2. One cannot become a king just by saying, "I am the king," without defeating one's enemies and taking possession of the country.
    
3. Beyond birth, creed, family and tribe, free from the distortion of attributes of name and appearance, transcending locality, time and objects, you are That, God himself. Meditate on the fact within yourself.
    
4. Just as the fire is the direct cause for cooking, so without Knowledge no emancipation can be had. Compared with all other forms of discipline Knowledge of the Self is the one direct means for liberation.
    
5. Abandoning the concerns of the world, abandoning concern about the body, and abandoning even concern about scriptures, see to the removal of wrong assumptions about yourself.
    
6. As the mind becomes more and more inward-turned, it becomes gradually freed from external desires, and when all such desires are fully eliminated self-realisation is completely freed from obstruction.
    
7. Day and night, dawn and dusk, winter and spring, all these are flitting across the stage of the world. While time thus is frolicking and befooling us, our life span is also running out; yet we do not , even a little, give up the clinging to our desires, nor do we let the desires loosen their grip on us.
    
8. Free yourself from lust, anger, greed and delusion. Contemplate on 'who you are'. Enquire within yourself, who am I ? The fools who fail to apprehend the Self are caught in hell-fire even here and now itself and suffer torture.
    
9. Surrender yourself to the Lotus Feet of the Teacher; with your senses and mind disciplined, and freed from the shackles of Samsara you will behold the Lord who is seated in your heart.
    
10. Childhood skips off on sport and play. Youth flies off in pursuits of love-making. As one grows older he is drowned in worry about the security and future of his wife and children. One's whole life gets spent in some kind of worry or other. And at no stage does man find time to lift his thoughts to God.
     
11. Cut off desire for the poison-like senses, for these are death-dealing. Get rid of pride in birth, family and state of life, and throw achievements far away. Drop such unreal things as the body into the sacrificial bowl of your true self, and develop wisdom within. You are the Witness. You are beyond the thinking mind. You are truly God, non-dual and supreme.
     
12. Regulated breathing and sense control, discrimination between the Enduring and the fleeting, the eternal and the transient, Japa and meditation, and submerging of the bodily and mental consciousness in the Consciousness of the Spirit, merging oneself into the total Inner Silence -- one must practice these with unrelenting fervour.