The love of God, conceived of as the Divine Mother, is the purest love we can imagine. Love may be found in everyday life, but it is often mixed with self-consideration. When one's own limited self becomes a prime consideration, love has the power to bind us. This same love has to be purified. Since we can only conceive of divine love based on the analogy of human love, we try to emulate the mother's love for the child. In order to free our love from all other associations and limitations, we turn to the mother's love, since this is the purest form of love we find amidst all human relationships. The love that the mother has for her child is virtually motiveless. When a mother loves her child, she has no selfish considerations. In other forms of love there is always some element of expectation – the love of a husband, wife or relative. But the love of a mother is to a very high degree, a pure love. In human terms, it is the purest form of love we know. Sri Ramakrishna used to say that one should call on God as Mother because the love one feels from one's own mother enables him to understand the true meaning of pure love.

Swami Swahananda

Sri Ramakrishna had been, as Swami Vivekananda said once of him, “like a flower”, living apart in the garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old time in India, suddenly burst into bloom in a world that had thought to dismiss its very memory.

It was at once the greatness and the tragedy of Swami Vivekananda’s life that he was not of this type.  His was the modern mind in its completeness.  I see him the heir to the spiritual discoveries and religious struggles of innumerable teachers and saints in the past of India and the world, and at the same time the pioneer and prophet of a new and future order of development. 

Sister Nivedita

The fact is that Sri Ramakrishna is not exactly what the ordinary followers have comprehended him to be.  He had infinite moods and phases.  Even if you might form an idea of the limits of Brahmajnana, the knowledge of the Absolute, you could not have any idea of the unfathomable depths of his mind!  Thousands of Vivekanandas may spring forward through one gracious glance of his eyes! …  Time and again, have I received in this life marks of his grace.  He stands behind and gets all work done by me.  When lying helpless under a tree in an agony of hunger, when I had not even a scrap of cloth for Kaupina, when I was resolved to travel penniless round the world, even then help came in all ways by the grace of Sri Ramakrishna.  And again when crowds jostled with one another in the streets of Chicago to have a sight of this Vivekananda, then also, just because I had his grace, I could digest without difficulty all that honor – a hundredth part of which would have been enough to turn mad any ordinary man – because I had his grace; and by his will, victory followed everywhere.

Swami Vivekananda