- A yearning heart brings the dawn; soon after, the sun is visible. After longing comes God-vision.
- You will certainly attain God when you call upon Him with a yearning heart.
- You develop yearning for God when you’re finished with the enjoyment of worldly things. Then your only concern is to attain Him. You listen to anything anyone tells you about God.
- Pray to God with a yearning heart and weep. This will purify your mind. In clear water you can see the reflection of the sun. In the mirror of the ‘I,’ the devotee sees Brahman with attributes, the Primal Power. But the mirror must be perfectly clean. If there is any dirt, it will not catch the correct reflection.
- It’s not that you can attain Him by doing this and not by doing that. It depends on His grace. Yet you have to take to some action with a yearning heart. Longing for Him brings His grace.
- Whatever path you choose, call upon God with a longing heart. He is the knower within the heart. He will surely listen to your inner call. You will reach Him alone, whatever path you take, whether you believe in God with form or God without form, as long as you have a longing heart.
- One attains God when one develops intense love for Him. A lot of yearning is necessary. When one has great yearning, the whole mind goes to Him.
- God is not to be found in any religious text, philosophy, or in the Vedanta. You will not succeed unless you are restless for Him.
- It is futile to just reason. Be restless for Him and learn to love Him. Reasoning and jnana are like men who can only enter the outer rooms. But bhakti is like women who can go into the inner apartments.
- Yearning brings about God-intoxication, whether you follow the path of knowledge, or of love and devotion. The sage Durvasa was mad with the Knowledge of God.
- One attains the Lord when one develops yearning for Him. You must live with your family like an unchaste woman. An unchaste woman attends to all her household work with full attention, but her mind remains tied night and day to her paramour. Attend to all your household work, but always keep your mind on the Lord.
- He who sincerely tries to know God will realize Him. He will assuredly know Him. He who yearns for God and seeks nothing but Him will succeed.
- When one’s heart pines for God, know that God-realization is not far away. At dawn – when the eastern sky is red – one knows that the sun is soon going to rise.
- Yearning for God is essential. When a son bothers his parents for his inheritance, the parents consult one another and give him his share in advance. When you are earnest, God is sure to listen. Since He has created us, we certainly have a share in His house. He is our Father and Mother. We can force Him.
- A person doesn’t feel yearning for God until the desire for enjoyment is over. Until the desire for ‘lust and greed’ is satisfied, a person doesn’t remember the Mother of the Universe. A child busy playing doesn’t look for his mother. When his play is over, he says, ‘I want to go to my mother.’
- What need is there to think about whether God has form or not? It is enough to weep with longing in solitude, ‘O God, please show Yourself to me as You are!’
- When your soul is full of yearning for God, you don’t see any difference between good water and dirty water. To know God, one might go to a good person, but sometimes also to people who are ignorant. But when His grace descends, even the turbid water does no harm. When He grants Knowledge, He tells everything – which water is good and which bad.
- Association with the holy develops fondness for God, it generates love for Him. Unless you can develop yearning for God, you won’t achieve anything. By keeping the company of holy people, the heart becomes restless for God. It’s like feeling constantly worried when somebody at home is ill, worrying how the patient can be cured.
- This yearning should be like a person out of work who is running around from one office to another in the search of a job. If he’s told there’s no vacancy in the office, he goes again the next day to ask if one has occurred.
- Look here, if you seek with a yearning heart, you can have a vision of your true Self. But the more the desire for sense enjoyment remains, the more that vision is obscured.
- You must pray to God with a yearning heart. When you are sincere, He is bound to listen to your prayer.
- There are no two, only One. Whatever one may call God, if it is from the bottom of his heart, it will surely reach Him – it is yearning which brings it about.
- What‘s the use of going to Kashi if you have no yearning? If you have yearning, Kashi is right here. Why don’t they succeed even after visiting so many holy places and repeating the name so much? They have no yearning. If you call Him with longing, He reveals Himself.
- The means to God-realization is deep longing. Make the effort with your body, with your mind, with your speech. When there is too much bile in the body, a person suffers from jaundice. Everything looks yellow. Yellow is the only colour you see – in everything.
- You can’t enjoy the bliss of God without first getting rid of animal tendencies. You should pray to God to rid you of these inclinations and you must pray with yearning. He is the controller of our hearts and will surely listen if the prayer is earnest.
- Pray to Him with yearning. If you are sincere, He will surely listen. He may give you holy company – someone may tell you what to do to enable you to find God.
- You have to have such yearning for God as a child has when it doesn’t find his mother. He doesn’t forget her even if you offer him sandesh or other sweets. There is no way to pacify him and he insists, ‘No, I want to go to my mother!’ Ah! What a state, a child mad for its mother and crying, ‘Mother, Mother!’ There’s no way to make it forget its mother. The person who finds all joys of the world tasteless, who doesn’t care for money, name, fame, physical comforts and sense enjoyments.
- You can’t see God without yearning. And such longing doesn’t come until the desire for sense enjoyments has ended. Those who are surrounded by ‘lust and greed,’ who are not finished with their desires for enjoyment, do not feel yearning for God.