200 Ram Dass Quotes: Be Here Now Wisdom for the Soul

Ram Dass (April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019) studied with Neem Karoli Baba in India, founded the Love Serve Remember Foundation, and wrote more than a dozen books. Whether you are new to his work or returning to an old friend, you will find something below that meets you exactly where you are.

Editor’s Picks: 11 Ram Dass Quotes to Live By

1. Be Here Now Quotes

1. “Now is now. Are you going to be here or not?” — Ram Dass
2. “To be fully present in each moment of existence is to live in total contentment, in peace and love. To enter into this presence is to reside in a different state of being, in a timeless moment, in the eternal present.” — Ram Dass
3. “To live in the here and now is to have no regrets about the past, no worries or expectations for the future.” — Ram Dass
4. “Your whole life becomes a meditative act. It's not just sitting on your meditation pillow, your zafu. All of life is a big zafu, no matter whether you're driving or making love or whatever you're doing. It's all meditation. It is the practice of being here now.” — Ram Dass
5. “One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything — just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.” — Ram Dass
6. “Ego is neither good nor bad. The ego has a function. It is the vehicle through which you relate to the external world. But the ego is a collection of thoughts, and to the extent you identify with your thoughts, they keep you from being here now.” — Ram Dass
7. “At nearly seventy, surrounded by people who care for and love me, I'm still learning to be here now.” — Ram Dass
8. “Don't think about the past. Just be here now. Don't think about the future. Just be here now.” — Ram Dass
9. “Be here now.” — Ram Dass
10. “The quickest way to get through your stuff is to learn to listen to that place inside.” — Ram Dass
11. “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.” — Ram Dass
12. “The real battle is with our own inner feelings and beliefs about how it ought to be.” — Ram Dass
13. “You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it.” — Ram Dass
14. “The thinking mind is extinguished in love.” — Ram Dass
15. “The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being.” — Ram Dass

2. Love & Compassion Quotes

1. “Consciousness = energy = love = awareness = light = wisdom = beauty = truth = purity. It's all the SAME. Any trip you want to take leads to the SAME place.” — Ram Dass
2. “The guru is a mirror that reflects your higher Self, allows you to see that place of love and pure being in yourself.” — Ram Dass
3. “Practices are designed to put you back in touch with your true nature, the Self, to polish the mirror of your mind and heart so they truly reflect the spirit.” — Ram Dass
4. “The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.” — Ram Dass
5. “The openness of love is timeless. When you are with another being in love, you are sharing your being, your presence. You are just here, together in love.” — Ram Dass
6. “When you say, 'I fell in love with so-and-so,' what you are really saying is, 'So-and-so turns me on to the place in me where I am the ocean of love.'” — Ram Dass
7. “When your mind is quiet, you enter into the flow of love, and you just flow from one moment to the next as naturally as breathing. Whatever arises, I embrace it with love in the moment. This is my practice of polishing the mirror to reflect love. In this moment there is just awareness and love. If someone asks me how to get into their heart, I give them this practice: I Am Loving Awareness.” — Ram Dass
8. “You judge other people because you're not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart.” — Ram Dass
9. “Can you respond to suffering without closing down and still keep your heart open?” — Ram Dass
10. “Armoring the heart is the opposite of opening the heart.” — Ram Dass
11. “Though I can now stand and move around with a walker, I've grown to love my wheelchair (I call it my swan boat) and being wheeled about by people who care.” — Ram Dass
12. “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
13. “If I go into the place in myself that is love and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That's the entrance to Oneness.” — Ram Dass
14. “Maharaj-ji's teaching is love. That love stays with you wherever you are. The more open you are, the more you can receive the love. It's the beginning, the middle, and the end.” — Ram Dass
15. “I have a practice in which I say to myself, I am loving awareness. To begin, I focus my attention in the middle of my chest, on the heart-mind. I breathe in love and breathe out love. I watch all of the thoughts that create the stuff of my mind, and I love everything, love everything I can be aware of. I just love, just love, just love.” — Ram Dass
16. “I'm not interested in being a 'lover.' I'm interested in only being love.” — Ram Dass

3. Mindfulness Quotes

1. “When I am afraid of something, I come up as close to it as possible, and I notice my resistance. I allow myself to just notice the resistance, because the resistance intensifies the fear.” — Ram Dass
2. “I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered—that was real.” — Ram Dass
3. “If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets.” — Ram Dass
4. “You must center; find that place inside yourself.” — Ram Dass
5. “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.” — Ram Dass
6. “When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be.” — Ram Dass
7. “The true marriage is with God.” — Ram Dass
8. “We get to the point where our acts are not done out of attachment but instead are just done as they're done, and no new stuff is being created.” — Ram Dass
9. “A second part of the four-point cycle is that a person lives in a commune, an ashramite lives in the commune … that is, he takes care of the gardens, the babies, the goats, cooks the food, chops the wood, does Karma Yoga.” — Ram Dass
10. “To be fully present with ourselves and other beings is to focus on what is truly important in life, and by doing so, we become more conscious and loving.” — Ram Dass
11. “Inspiration is God making contact with itself.” — Ram Dass
12. “If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” — Ram Dass
13. “It's love for no reason, love without an object. It's just sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and permeates everything around.” — Ram Dass
14. “I do love everything and everybody — not necessarily their personalities, but their essential being — because that is my essential being too. That's soul perception.” — Ram Dass

4. Suffering Quotes

1. “Much of the suffering of aging comes from holding onto those memories of who we used to be.” — Ram Dass
2. “Suffering is part of the way it all works.” — Ram Dass
3. “One of the hardest psychological hurdles I had to deal with after the stroke was the loss of independence.” — Ram Dass
4. “Getting old isn't easy for a lot of us. Neither is living, neither is dying. We struggle against the inevitable and we all suffer because of it.” — Ram Dass
5. “Suffering didn't make me more fearful. It made me more real.” — Ram Dass
6. “Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.” — Ram Dass
7. “The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.” — Ram Dass
8. “My life is a creative act — like a painting, or a concerto.” — Ram Dass
9. “Suffering is the crucible where real faith is born.” — Ram Dass
10. “Pain is a worthy adversary for my spiritual practices.” — Ram Dass
11. “It's the message that suffering is grace.” — Ram Dass
12. “Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.” — Ram Dass
13. “When you go back to your true self, you then experience the love that is who you really are.” — Ram Dass
14. “The game is not about how you look or what you achieve, but about how you love.” — Ram Dass

5. Awareness Quotes

1. “When I could finally focus on the question, I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware!” — Ram Dass
2. “The journey passes through the seven valleys, the seven kingdoms, the chakras, the planes of consciousness, the degrees of faith.” — Ram Dass
3. “Everything in life is grist for the mill of your awareness.” — Ram Dass
4. “You are only doing your own being, you're only manifesting how evolved a consciousness you are.” — Ram Dass
5. “When you're protesting against somebody, the degree of consciousness with which you're protesting determines how well they can hear what it is you're really saying.” — Ram Dass
6. “We don't even understand in the West what it means to train consciousness, or what it means to develop these disciplines of one point. Because it is literally true that, were you able to keep your consciousness in the same place, on one point – literally on one point for twelve seconds – you would be one of the most enlightened beings.” — Ram Dass
7. “The witness is your awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Witnessing is like waking up in the morning and then looking in the mirror and noticing yourself — not judging or criticizing, just neutrally observing the quality of being awake.” — Ram Dass
8. “A true guru reflects our innermost being, our true Self, because he or she lives in that place. The guru's loving awareness of our journey, at every level, is an ever-present homing beacon on the path.” — Ram Dass
9. “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” — Ram Dass
10. “As I witness my own life more and more as an offering, other things in my life have less of a pull on me. Doing it for me isn't nearly as interesting as surrendering it outward, upward, inward.” — Ram Dass
11. “There is only one of us. One consciousness manifesting into different forms.” — Ram Dass
12. “It is my feeling that the only thing you have to fear is fear.” — Ram Dass
13. “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 is to quiet my mind and open my heart.” — Ram Dass
14. “For many years, I'd been thinking about the phenomenon of death, but not my own death. Now, when I piece it together with my heart, not with my intellect, I find nothing to fear if I identify with loving awareness.” — Ram Dass

6. Ego Quotes

1. “A therapist who thinks he is a therapist can only create a patient who thinks he is a patient. A therapist who thinks he is a personality can merely exchange one personality package for another personality package.” — Ram Dass
2. “I really see therapy, in terms of personality, as body and repair work. But it has nothing to do with essence.” — Ram Dass
3. “He can't even imagine that there is a way of being that has nothing to do with personality.” — Ram Dass
4. “The people who gather to hear somebody called Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, have somewhere, at some level, in some remote corner, some involvement in this journey.” — Ram Dass
5. “When you quiet your mind enough to transcend your ego, you can begin to hear how it all is.” — Ram Dass
6. “When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you're holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You're denying how it is.” — Ram Dass
7. “What changed through the stroke was my attachment to the ego. The stroke was unbearable to the ego, and so it pushed me into the soul level also, because when you 'bear the unbearable,' something within you dies.” — Ram Dass
8. “My identity flipped over and I said, 'So that's who I am — I'm a Soul!' I ended up where looking at the world from the Soul level is my ordinary, everyday state.” — Ram Dass
9. “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
10. “The game is not about becoming somebody, it's about becoming nobody.” — Ram Dass
11. “Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.” — Ram Dass
12. “There's gonna be a bardo, but nobody to cross it. So why be frightened?” — Ram Dass
13. “Whatever you do, who you are is what will make the difference. Learn to identify with your soul. Do it with love.” — Ram Dass
14. “Love is more powerful than death.” — Ram Dass

7. Meditation Quotes

1. “When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, 'You're too this, or I'm too this.' That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.” — Ram Dass
2. “It's very easy to break attachments to worldly games when you're sitting in a cave in the Himalayas.” — Ram Dass
3. “If you meditate on your ideal, you will acquire its nature. If you think of God day and night, you will acquire the nature of God.” — Ram Dass
4. “One reason to practice purification is to cool out, so we're not creating so much heavy karma for ourselves.” — Ram Dass
5. “People first awaken to a spiritual dimension in their lives in an incredible variety of ways. Some people seem to open up to it through traumatic experiences. Other people awaken through meditation or through religious experiences. Others arrive at it through sex or through drugs.” — Ram Dass
6. “It isn't better to give up sex, or better to fast; we don't do renunciation practices to be good.” — Ram Dass
7. “If we can get over the value judgments, we can listen to what it is we need to do without getting caught in all of the social pressures.” — Ram Dass
8. “Relationships and emotions can reinforce our separateness, or they can be grist for the mill of awakening.” — Ram Dass
9. “All that I can see that we can do with one another is share notes of our exploration.” — Ram Dass
10. “The embarrassment I felt over getting older has nearly disappeared with my physical disability.” — Ram Dass
11. “The next message you need is always right where you are.” — Ram Dass
12. “A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.” — Ram Dass
13. “It's simple, but it's not easy. A dying person needs you to be fully there, just being, listening for what is needed with love and kindness but not trying to impose ideas of how to die.” — Ram Dass
14. “Everybody you have ever loved is a part of the fabric of your being now. The body may die, but the soul remains.” — Ram Dass

8. Death & Dying Quotes

1. “You gotta die to be born…Only when you have been born again do you enter the Kingdom of heaven.” — Ram Dass
2. “But I spoke too soon. As I looked down at my legs for reassurance, I could see nothing below the kneecaps…A scream formed in my throat. I felt that I must be dying since there was nothing in my universe that led me to believe in life after leaving the body.” — Ram Dass
3. “India then was a place where death wasn't in the closet. People didn't seem to be frightened of it in the way that Westerners usually are. In the villages, people died at home with their extended families.” — Ram Dass
4. “Dying is like taking off a tight shoe.” — Ram Dass
5. “The fear of death seems somehow to have flown the coop somewhere along the way in this game.” — Ram Dass
6. “Everybody's in the process of going to God, and dying's merely one of the vehicles of doing it. These are all exercises for becoming more conscious.” — Ram Dass
7. “The predicament is that enlightenment is not an achievement; enlightenment is a transformation of being.” — Ram Dass
8. “Take what you can use, and lose the rest.” — Ram Dass
9. “Psychotherapy is just as high as the psychotherapist. If your psychotherapist happened to be Buddha, you would get enlightened in the process, see… you will get as free of your particular role-attachments as the psychiatrist is free of his…” — Ram Dass
10. “The images our culture generates are designed to make you feel that aging is a kind of failure; that somehow God made a big mistake.” — Ram Dass
11. “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.” — Ram Dass
12. “I can do nothing for you but work on myself… you can do nothing for me but work on yourself!” — Ram Dass
13. “In 1967 I met Neem Karoli Baba, a meeting which changed the course of my life. In the depth of his compassion, wisdom, humor, power and love I found human possibility never before imagined.” — Ram Dass
14. “There sat Maharaji in his blanket in the darkness, immobile as a statue. This was the force that drew me. It was love beyond love.” — Ram Dass

9. Service Quotes

1. “As soon as you give it all up you can have it all.” — Ram Dass
2. “If a man gives way to all his desires…he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.” — Ram Dass
3. “Recently, a friend said to me, 'You're more human since the stroke than you were before.' This touched me profoundly. What a gift the stroke has given me, to finally learn that I don't have to renounce my humanity in order to be spiritual.” — Ram Dass
4. “The process of awakening brings you into a struggle with every habitual way you have of thinking about the universe, even the deepest ones, because every one of them has locked you into some facet of who you think you are. That doesn't mean you have to give up everything at once; we can give up things as we come to not need them as badly anymore.” — Ram Dass
5. “Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.” — Ram Dass
6. “Not a leaf turns but that God is behind it.” — Ram Dass
7. “Our true strength lies in our honesty with ourselves about our predicament.” — Ram Dass
8. “There is just old stuff running off, but nobody being affected by it because there is nothing in us that clings to a model of who we are or aren't.” — Ram Dass
9. “I can say, 'Watch out, because around that bend the road falls off sharply to the left … stay far over on the right when you do that.'” — Ram Dass
10. “In the elderly, two sets of values operate simultaneously: the desire to stay active and to maintain a sense of self-worth in the eyes of others, and the desire to withdraw from social commitments to a more leisurely, contemplative life.” — Ram Dass
11. “Ask yourself: Where am I? Answer: Here. Ask yourself: What time is it? Answer: Now. Say it until you can hear it.” — Ram Dass
12. “We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.” — Ram Dass
13. “We came with our varying hues of cynicism and faith, open or closed heartedness. To each, Maharajji responded uniquely: now fiercely, now tenderly. He did what was necessary to quiet the mind and open the heart so that the thirst that had drawn us all to him could be slaked.” — Ram Dass
14. “We're being trained through our incarnations — trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.” — Ram Dass

10. Wisdom Quotes

1. “I was just getting more and more knowledgeable. And I was getting very good at bouncing three knowledge balls at once. […] It was a hustle.” — Ram Dass
2. “When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.” — Ram Dass
3. “Essence means that the therapist has to know who he or she is.” — Ram Dass
4. “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
5. “One of the best parts of aging is entering the 'don't know,' learning to be someone who can rest comfortably in uncertainty.” — Ram Dass
6. “Don't be a wise elder, be an incarnation of wisdom.” — Ram Dass
7. “You are not your roles. You are two souls. This is it. This is the moment of living truth.” — Ram Dass
8. “Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.” — Ram Dass
9. “Wise beings can be peaceful in the midst of chaos, experiencing delight in the changing play of forms.” — Ram Dass
10. “Life is an incredible curriculum in which we live it richly and passionately as a way of awakening to the deepest truths of our being.” — Ram Dass
11. “The beginning of wisdom comes from the capacity to look at what is.” — Ram Dass
12. “We let go of knowledge to come into the totality, and out of that comes wisdom.” — Ram Dass
13. “The richness of a moment comes when it's both full and empty at the same time. The truth is, we live simultaneously in time and timelessness.” — Ram Dass
14. “Wisdom is one of the few things in human life that does not diminish with age.” — Ram Dass
15. “The game is to be where you are – honestly, consciously, and as fully as you know how.” — Ram Dass

11. Stillness Quotes

1. “And after 2 or 300 times of this, [I] began to feel an extraordinary kind of depression set in—a very gentle depression that whatever I knew still wasn't enough!” — Ram Dass
2. “And whatever the psychoanalysis did (and it did many things, I'm sure) I still was a neurotic at the end of those five years of psychoanalysis.” — Ram Dass
3. “Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.” — Ram Dass
4. “If while we are together we cultivate the quietness in ourselves, we may receive the transmission we seek.” — Ram Dass
5. “We're fascinated by the words, but where we meet is in the silence behind them.” — Ram Dass
6. “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” — Ram Dass
7. “Each person gets his karmuppance. If we focus on God, we get God.” — Ram Dass
8. “The only thing you have to offer to another human being, ever, is your own state of being.” — Ram Dass
9. “You can do it like it's a great weight on you, or you can do it like it's part of the dance.” — Ram Dass
10. “We are all one. We are all talking to ourselves when we talk to one another.” — Ram Dass
11. “There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.” — Ram Dass
12. “Let's trade in all our judging for appreciating. Let's lay down our righteousness and just be together.” — Ram Dass
13. “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
14. “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.” — Ram Dass

12. Acceptance Quotes

1. “Healing is not the same as curing, after all; 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
2. “We are moving toward a light that embraces darkness.” — Ram Dass
3. “You can't teach a hunter it is wrong to kill.” — Ram Dass
4. “There is nowhere to go & there is nothing to do.” — Ram Dass
5. “If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.” — Ram Dass
6. “Nothing we can think of is going to do it. Nothing we experience is it—because our minds think of things, and we and the things are separate.” — Ram Dass
7. “When we are in harmony with the way everything proceeds from everything else, we cannot act wrongly.” — Ram Dass
8. “That's the only dance there is!” — Ram Dass
9. “For one period, a person would be in the hermitage on the top of the hill where he would be going deep – diving deep within.” — Ram Dass
10. “How vividly I recall, after my first meeting with Maharajji, how all my disdain and arrogance disappeared before an almost overwhelming desire literally to be at his feet.” — Ram Dass
11. “The World is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it.” — Ram Dass
12. “Your problem is you're too busy holding on to your unworthiness.” — Ram Dass
13. “Once you get that first glimpse of living Spirit, once your heart opens even for a moment to unconditional love, everything in your life becomes grist for the mill of your awakening.” — Ram Dass
14. “Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.” — Ram Dass

13. Spiritual Journey Quotes

1. “You Are The Guru. That's what's so far out. You are your own guru.” — Ram Dass
2. “You Are It…It's really just another cop-out to be searching for the guru. He's your fingernail.” — Ram Dass
3. “A teacher points the way. A guru is the Way.” — Ram Dass
4. “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
5. “Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW…so you stop asking.” — Ram Dass
6. “The moment at which we look up, the moment at which we look in, starts the journey back.” — Ram Dass
7. “Although my outward life has been radically altered, I don't see myself as a stroke victim. I see myself as a Soul who's watching 'him' experience the aftermath of this cerebral hemorrhage.” — Ram Dass
8. “The motivation for doing this is most interesting—it's only to work on myself.” — Ram Dass
9. “Your life experience is a vehicle for coming to God, for becoming conscious, for becoming liberated.” — Ram Dass
10. “Do your work, but without attachment, and without thinking of yourself as being the actor.” — Ram Dass
11. “When you are fully in the moment, this moment is all there is.” — Ram Dass
12. “We're all just walking each other home.” — Ram Dass
13. “You've been somebody long enough. You spent the first half of your life becoming somebody. Now you can work on becoming nobody, which is really somebody. For when you become nobody there is no tension, no pretense, no one trying to be anyone or anything. The natural state of the mind shines through unobstructed — and the natural state of the mind is pure love.” — Ram Dass
14. “True compassion arises out of the plane of consciousness where I AM you.” — Ram Dass

14. Daily Practice Quotes

1. “Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your Transformation. Use it!” — Ram Dass
2. “Life is actually fun. That wasn't something I could say back in my teens and twenties.” — Ram Dass
3. “At no time was I asked, do you want to stay? Do you want to study? Everything was understood. There were no contracts. There were no promises. There were no vows. There was nothing.” — Ram Dass
4. “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
5. “To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.” — Ram Dass
6. “What we're looking for is who is looking; it's happening all around us, and we are what's happening.” — Ram Dass
7. “I'd rather now just talk about how it is when you are free to play with God for the rest of your life…” — Ram Dass
8. “There are periods of going out and there are periods of turning back in, periods of going out and periods of going back in.” — Ram Dass
9. “Motivations and desires affect our perceptions. We don't necessarily see things as they are. We see them as we are.” — Ram Dass
10. “Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.” — Ram Dass
11. “Here we are. Here and Now. That's all there is.” — Ram Dass
12. “When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.” — Ram Dass
13. “The art of listening comes from a quiet mind and an open heart.” — Ram Dass
14. “We polish the mirror of our spiritual hearts, so the beauty of our soul becomes visible.” — Ram Dass

How to Use These Ram Dass Quotes

• Start the day: read one quote slowly before touching your phone, and let it sit with you over morning coffee.
• Journal prompt: pick a line that stings a little — that is usually the one you most need to hear.
• Share with care: his words on grief and dying are tender; send them to someone who is struggling, not as advice but as company.
• Memorize one: “Be here now” is three syllables. Make it your password, your screensaver, your breath.
• Go deeper: many of these lines come from Be Here Now (1971) and Polishing the Mirror (2013) — both worth reading whole.

More Wisdom Quotes to Explore

• Dalai Lama quotes on compassion
• Alan Watts quotes on the present moment
• Buddha quotes on suffering and peace
• Rumi quotes on love and the soul
• Marcus Aurelius quotes on acceptance
• Stoic quotes on what you can control
• Khalil Gibran quotes on life and love
• Viktor Frankl quotes on meaning
• gratitude quotes for daily practice
• hope quotes for dark days
• happiness quotes to lift your mood
• life quotes for every season

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Ram Dass?

Ram Dass (1931–2019), born Richard Alpert, was an American spiritual teacher and psychologist. After being dismissed from Harvard in 1963 alongside Timothy Leary, he traveled to India, became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, and wrote the 1971 classic Be Here Now, which introduced Eastern spirituality to a generation of Western seekers.

What is Ram Dass’s most famous quote?

“We’re all just walking each other home” is his most quoted line — a gentle reminder that we are companions, not competitors, on the spiritual path. “Be here now” (the title of his 1971 book) and “The quieter you become, the more you can hear” are close behind.

What does “Be here now” mean?

It is Ram Dass’s simplest and deepest teaching: stop living in regrets about the past or anxieties about the future, and rest your attention fully on this moment. The phrase became the title of his 1971 book and the shorthand for his entire philosophy.

Did Ram Dass really say “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag”?

Yes — it is one of his most widely repeated teachings from his lectures, a playful way of saying that the divine wears countless disguises, including the difficult people in your life. Like many of his spoken teachings, it circulated for years before appearing in print.