Swami Vivekananda, one of India’s most revered spiritual leaders, left behind a legacy of wisdom that continues to inspire people across generations. His teachings, rooted in Vedanta and universal values, are powerful reminders of the strength of the human spirit. Swami Vivekananda quotes are more than just words—they are guiding principles for personal growth, leadership, and self-realization.
Whether you’re seeking motivation, clarity, or a deeper sense of purpose, these quotes offer timeless insight into living a meaningful life.
Swami Vivekananda Quotes
- All differences in this world are of degree, and not of a kind because oneness is the secret of everything.
2. Do good because it is good to do good. Ask no more.
3. The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.
4. Do one thing at a time, and while doing it put your whole soul into it to the exclusion of all else.
5. Do not hate anybody, because that hatred which comes out from you must, in the long run, come back to you, if you love, that love will come back to you, completing the circle.
6. Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, ‘Thy will be done.’ We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.
7. The mind is in its own nature when it is calm. The moment you can calm it, that [very] moment you will know the truth.
8. The powers of the mind are like the rays of the sun when they are concentrated they illumine.
9. Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life – think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
10. If money helps a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better.
11. All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.
12. Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes.
13. Arise, awake, and stop not until the goal is achieved.
14. Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.
15. When an idea exclusively occupies the mind, it is transformed into an actual physical or mental state.
16. Blessed are they whose bodies get destroyed in the service of others.
17. Learn Everything that is Good from Others, but bring it in, and in your own way absorb it; do not become others.
18. Talk to yourself at least once in a day, otherwise, you may miss a meeting with an excellent person in this World.
19. You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.
20. Dare to be free, dare to go as far as your thought leads, and dare to carry that out in your life.
21. Always try to represent yourself as happy. Initially, it becomes your look, gradually it becomes your habit and finally, it becomes your personality.
22. The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.
23. We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
24. The very reason for nature’s existence is for the education of the soul.
25. Anything that makes you weak – physically, intellectually, and spiritually, reject it as poison.
26. Be not Afraid of anything. You will do Marvelous work. it is Fearlessness that brings Heaven even in a moment.
27. He who struggles is better than he who never attempts.
28. The Older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness. This is my new gospel.
29. Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.
30. Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.
31. By doing well the duty which is nearest to us, the duty which is in our hands, we make ourselves stronger.
32. All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love’s sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.
33. Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.
34. The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: the man or woman who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish person, is the most successful.
35. You are the creator of your own destiny.
36. Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.
37. Where can we go to find God if we cannot see Him in our own hearts and in every living being.
38. They alone live, who live for others.
39. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind.
40. The greatest truths are the simplest things in the world, simple as your own existence.
41. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present.
42. The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.
43. You need not worry or make yourself sleepless about the world; it will go on without you.
44. Books are infinite in number and time is short. The secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it.
45. The greatest sin is to think yourself weak.
46. Throw away all weaknesses. tell your body that it is strong. Tell your mind that it is strong and have unbound faith and hope in yourself.
47. Things do not grow better; they remain as they are. It is we who grow better, by the changes we make in ourselves.
48. The earth is enjoyed by heroes”—this is the unfailing truth. Be a hero. Always say, “I have no fear.”
49. Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.
50. Be the servant while leading. Be unselfish. Have infinite patience, and success is yours.
51. Believe in yourself and the world will be at your feet.
52. This World will always continue to be a mixture of Good and Evil. Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to Love even the wrongdoer.
53. Devotion to duty is the highest form of worship of God.
54. In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart.
55. Strength is Life, Weakness is Death. Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death. Love is Life, Hatred is Death.
56. The mother and the father are the causes of this body; so a man must undergo a thousand troubles in order to do good to them.
57. Whatever you think that you will be. If you think yourself weak, weak you will be; if you think yourself strong,you will be.
58. Everything is easy when you are busy. But nothing is easy when you are lazy.
59. Bless people when they revile you. Think how much good they are doing by helping to stamp out the false ego.
60. A fool may buy all the books in the world, and they will be in his library, but he will be able to read only those that he deserves to.
61. There is no limit to the power of the human mind. The more concentrated it is, the more power is brought to bear on one point.
62. Education is the manifestation of perfection already existing in man.
63. The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.
64. People laugh at me because I am different; I laugh at people cause the are all the same.
65. Take Risks in Your Life If u Win, U Can Lead! If u Lose, U Can Guide!
66. In a day, when you don’t come across any problems – you can be sure that you are traveling in a wrong path.
67. The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.
68. Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you, but do not think of that now.
69. 3 Golden rules!! Who is helping you, don’t forget them. Who is loving you, don’t hate them. Who is trusting you, don’t cheat them.
70. God did not give me everything that I wanted. But, He gave me everything that I needed!
71. You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual.
72. Things do not grow better; they remain as they are. It is we who grow better, by the changes we make in ourselves.
73. He who struggles is better than he who never attempts.
74. You know the disease, you know the remedy, only have faith.
75. The benefits of knowledge can only be realized in practice.
76. Attachment comes only where we expect a return.
77. There is but one temple – the body. It is the only temple that ever existed.
78. Do not hate anybody, because that hatred which comes out from you must, in the long run, come back to you. If you love, that love will come back to you, completing the circle.
79. No civilisation can grow unless fanatics, bloodshed, and brutality stop. No civilisation can begin to lift up its head until we look charitably upon one another; and the first step towards that much-needed charity is to look charitably and kindly upon the religious convictions of others. Nay more, to understand that not only should we be charitable, but positively helpful to each other, however different our religious ideas and convictions may be.
80. Do not look back upon what has been done. Go Ahead.
81. Blame nobody else, do not commit the mistake of the ignorant.
82. The mistake is that we cling to the body when it is the spirit that is really immortal.
83. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.
84. If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished.
85. Take courage and work on. Patience and steady work- this is the only way.
86. Neither seek nor avoid; take what comes. It is liberty to be affected by nothing. Do not merely endure; be unattached.
87. True religion is not talk, or doctrines, or theories, nor is it sectarianism. It is the relation between soul and God. Religion does not consist in erecting temples, or building churches, or attending public worship. It is not to be found in books, or in words, or in lectures, or in organizations. Religion consists in realization. We must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion.
88. If you think that you are bound, you remain bound; you make your own bondage. If you know that you are free, you are free this moment. This is knowledge, knowledge of freedom. Freedom is the goal of all nature.
89. As long as we require someone else to make us happy, we are slaves.
90. Give up all desire for enjoyment in earth or heaven. Control the organs of the senses and control the mind. Bear every misery without even knowing that you are miserable. Think of nothing but spiritual freedom.
91. The best guide in life is strength. In religion, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you, have nothing to do with it.
92. Remember the words of Christ: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” These words are literally true, not figures or fiction. They were the outflow of the heart’s blood of one of the greatest sons of God who have ever come to this world of ours; words which came as the fruit of realisation, from a man who had felt and realised God himself; who had spoken with God, lived with God, a hundred times more intensely than you or I see this building.
93. One may gain political and social independence, but if one is a slave to his passions and desires, one cannot feel the pure joy of real freedom.
94. “Society does not go down because of the activities of criminals,
But because of the inactivities of the good people.”
95. The man who gives way to anger, or hatred, or any other passion, cannot work; he only breaks himself to pieces, and does nothing practical. It is the calm, forgiving, equable, well-balanced mind that does the greatest amount of work.
96. Man makes the mistake of separating himself from God and identifying himself with the body.
97. All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore make your own future. “Let the dead past bury its dead.” The infinite future is before you.
98. “I do not want to get material life, do not want the sense-life, but something higher.” That is renunciation. Then, by the power of meditation, undo the mischief that has been done.
99. My children, the secret of religion lies not in theories but in practice.
100. The brain and muscles must develop simultaneously. Iron nerves with an intelligent brain — and the whole world is at your feet.
101. Never even attempt to disturb anyone’s tendencies.
102. Why are people so afraid? The answer is that they have made themselves helpless and dependent on others. We are so lazy, we do not want to do anything ourselves. We want a Personal God, a Savior or a Prophet to do everything for us.
103. The best principles in our lives were those which we heard from our mothers through our ears.
104. Wherever in any society there are too many laws, it is a sure sign that that society will soon die. If you study the characteristics of India, you will find that no nation possesses so many laws as the Hindus, and national death is the result.
105. When we use our imagination properly it is our greatest friend; it goes belyond reason and is the only light that takes us everywhere.
106. For a warrior, nothing is higher than a war against evil. The warrior confronted with such a war should be pleased, Arjuna, for it comes as an open gate to heaven. But if you do not participate in this battle against evil, you will incur sin, violating your dharma and your honor.
107. The goal of mankind is knowledge … Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man ‘knows’, should, in strict psychological language, be what he ‘discovers’ or ‘unveils’; what man ‘learns’ is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.
108. Go on bravely. Do not expect success in a day or a year. Always hold on to the highest. Be steady. Avoid jealousy and selfishness. Be obedient and eternally faithful to the cause of truth, humanity, and your country, and you will move the world.
109. Let there be as little materialism as possible, with the maximum of spirituality.
110. In whatever name or form they are offered, all these flowers are laid at God’s feet, for He is the one Lord of all, the one Soul of all souls.
111. In real meditation you forget the body. You may be cut to pieces and not feel it at all. You feel such pleasure in it. You become so light. This perfect rest we will get in meditation.
112. Everything that we perceive around us is struggling towards freedom, from the atom to the man, from the insentient, lifeless particle of matter to the highest existence on earth, the human soul. The whole universe is in fact the result of this struggle for freedom.
113. Are great things ever done smoothly? Time, patience, and indomitable will must show.
114. There cannot be two almighty beings in this world. [Imagine having] two or three Gods; one will create the world, another says, “I will destroy the world.” It [can] never happen. There must be one God. The soul attains to perfection; [it becomes] almost omnipotent [and] omniscient. This is the worshipper. Who is the worshipped? He, the Lord God Himself, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient, and so on. And above all, He is Love. How is [the soul] to attain this perfection? By worship.
115. We know how often in our lives through laziness and cowardice we give up the battle and try to hypnotise our minds into the belief that we are brave.
116. The kingdom of heaven is already in existence if we will have it, that perfection is already in man if he will see it.
117. Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.
118. God is to be worshiped as the one Beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life.
119. Freedom can never be reached by the weak. Throw away all weakness. Tell your body that it is strong, tell your mind that it is strong, and have unbounded faith and hope in yourself.
120. The Tapas and the other hard Yogas that were practiced in other Yugas do not work now. What is needed in this Yuga is giving, helping others.
121. Evil company is always to be shunned; because it leads to lust and anger, illusion, forgetfulness of the goal, destruction of the will (lack of perseverance), and destruction of everything. (Narada Bhakti Sutra)
122. With everything we do in life we identify ourselves. Here is a man who says harsh words to me. I feel anger coming on me. In a few seconds anger and I are one, and then comes misery. Attach yourselves to the Lord and to nothing else, because everything else is unreal. Attachment to the unreal will bring misery. There is only one Existence that is real, only one Life in which there is neither object nor [subject].
123. The ground under the Bilva tree is very holy. Meditating here quickly brings about an awakening of the religious instinct. Shri Ramakrishna used to say so.
124. This attachment of Love to God is indeed one that does not bind the soul but effectively breaks all its bondages.
125. We are what our considered opinion abide through us; so put up with assiduousness about what you storage. Natter are sub-. Line live; they travel far.
126. By work alone, men may get to where Buddha got largely by meditation or Christ by prayer. Buddha was a working Jnani, Christ was a Bhakta, but the same goal was reached by both of them. Good motives, sincerity, and infinite love can conquer the world. One single soul possessed of these virtues can destroy the dark designs of millions of hypocrites and brutes.
127. Salvation means knowing the truth. We do not become anything; we are what we are. Salvation [comes] by faith and not by work. It is a question of knowledge! You must know what you are, and it is done. The dream vanishes. This you [and others] are dreaming here. When they die, they go to [the] heaven [of their dream]. They live in that dream, and [when it ends], they take a nice body [here], and they are good people.
128. That the Hindus, absorbed in the ideal, lacked in realistic observation is evident from this. Take painting and sculpture. What do you see in the Hindu paintings? All sorts of grotesque and unnatural figures. What do you see in a Hindu temple? A Chaturbhanga Narayana or some such thing. But take into consideration any Italian picture or Grecian statue-what a study of nature you find in them! A gentleman for twenty years sat burning a candle in his hand, in order to paint a lady carrying a candle in her hand.
129. It is the same India which has withstood the shocks of centuries, of hundreds of foreign invasions of hundreds of upheavals of manners and customs. It is the same land which stands firmer than any rock in the world, with its undying vigour, indestructible life. Its life is of the same nature as the soul, without beginning and without end, immortal; and we are the children of such a country.
130. If you intend to study the mind, you must have systematic training; you must practice to bring the mind under your control.
131. No study has taken so much of human energy, whether in times past or present, as the study of the soul, of God, and of human destiny.
132. Christ said, “I and my father are one”, and you repeat it. Yet it has not helped mankind. For nineteen hundred years men have not understood that saying. They make Christ the saviour of men. He is God and we are worms!.
133. Differentiation is in name and form only.
134. Not one atom can rest until it finds its freedom.
135. Hold to the idea, “I am not the mind, I see that I am thinking, I am watching my mind act,” and each day the identification of yourself with thoughts and feelings will grow less, until at last you can entirely separate yourself from the mind and actually know it to be apart from yourself.
136. The forms are evanescent; but the spirit, being in the Lord and of the Lord, is immortal and omnipresent.
137. I am the thread that runs through all these pearls, and each pearl is a religion or even a sect thereof. Such are the different pearls, and God is the thread that runs through all of them; most people, however, are entirely unconscious of it.
138. Do not desire, for what you desire you get, and with it comes terrible bondage. It is nothing but bringing “noses on us,” as in the case of the man who had three boons to ask. We never get freedom until we are self-contained. “Self is the Saviour of self, none else.”
139. What we call powers, secrets of nature, and force, are all within. In the external world are only a series of changes.
140. Every act of charity, every thought of sympathy, every action of help, every good deed, is taking so much of self-importance away from our little selves and making us think of ourselves as the lowest and the least, and, therefore, it is all good. Here we find that Jnâna, Bhakti, and Karma – all come to one point.
141. Do not fret because the world looks with suspicion at every new attempt, even though it be in the path of spirituality.
142. The chief helps in this liberation are Abhyasa and Vairagya. Vairagya is non – attachment to life, because it is the will to enjoy that brings all this bondage in its train; and Abhyasa is constant practice of any one of the Yogas.
143. The same fire that cooks a meal for us may burn a child, and it is no fault of the fire if it does so; the difference lies in the way in which it is used.
144. A man could be in a throne and have no attachment at all; another one could be in rags and have many attachments.
145. As soon as I think that I am a little body, I want to preserve it, to protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies; then you and I become separate.
146. Many a time comes when we want to interpret our weakness and cowardice as forgiveness and renunciation.
147. Build up your health. Do not dwell in silence upon your sorrows.
148. The book is all in us. Fool, hearest not thou? In thine own heart day and night is singing that Eternal Music – Sachchidânanda, soham, soham – Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute, I am He, I am He.
149. Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry.
150. Give up, renounce the world. Now we are like dogs strayed into a kitchen and eating a piece of meat, looking round in fear lest at any moment some one may come and drive them out. Instead of that, be a king and know you own the world. This never comes until you give it up and it ceases to bind. Give up mentally, if you do not physically. Give up from the heart of your hearts
151. Life without death and happiness without misery are contradiction and neither can be found alone, because each of them is a different manifestation of the same thing.
152. YOU know, I may have to be born again, you see, I have fallen in love with mankind.
153. Om is the greatest, meaning the Absolute.
154. Thought is like a bubble rising to the surface. When thought is joined to will, we call it power. That which strikes the sick person whom you are trying to help is not thought, but power.
155. Too early religious advancement of the Hindus and that superfineness in everything which made them cling to higher alternatives, have reduced them to what they are. The Hindus have to learn a little bit of materialism from the West and teach them a little bit of spirituality.
156. Crossing over mountains, rivers, arid oceans, setting at naught, as it were, the obstacles of the distance of space and time, the blood of Indian thought has flowed, and is still flowing into the veins of other nations of the globe, whether in a distinct or in some subtle unknown way. Perhaps to us belongs the major portion of the universal ancient inheritance.
157. The Indian mind is first religious, then anything else. So this is to be strengthened.
158. Charity opens the heart.
159. Unity in variety is the plan of the universe.
160. Where God is, there is no other. Where world is, there is no God. These two will never unite. Like light and darkness.
161. We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.
162. Hindus believe Buddha to be an Avatara.
163. Let each one of us pray day and night for the downtrodden millions who are held fast by poverty, priestcraft, and tyranny. Pray day and night for them. I care more to preach religion to them than to the high and the rich.
164. So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them.
165. Business is business, no child’s play.
166. Never producing pain by thought, word, and deed, in any living being, is what is called Ahimsâ, non-injury.
167. Perfection is one thing and enjoyment another; these two having different ends, engage men differently.
168. There is no power on earth which can be kept long confined within a narrow limit. It cannot be kept compressed too long to allow of expansion at a subsequent period.
169. We have to practice to become perfect.
170. Remember the only sign of life is motion and growth.
171. Wait with patience and love and strength. If helpers are not ready now, they will come in time. Why should we be in a hurry? The real working force of all great work is in its almost unperceived beginnings.
172. The wind is blowing; those vessels whose sails are unfurled catch it, and go forward on their way, but those which have their sails furled do not catch the wind. Is that the fault of the wind? Is it the fault of the merciful Father, whose wind of mercy is blowing without ceasing, day and night, whose mercy knows no decay, is it His fault that some of us are happy and some unhappy? We make our own destiny. His sun shines for the weak as well as for the strong. His wind blows for saint and sinner alike. He is the Lord of all, the Father of all, merciful, and impartial.
173. The natural ambition of woman is through marriage to climb up, leaning upon a man; but those days are gone. You shall be great without the help of any man, just as you are.
174. Father is the existence out of which everything comes; Son is that knowledge. It is in Christ that God will be manifest. God was everywhere, in all beings, before Christ; but in Christ we became conscious of Him. This is God. The third is bliss, the Holy Spirit.
175. There is no such thing as “righteous” anger or justifiable killing.
176. If you think about disaster, you will get it. Brood about death and you hasten your demise. Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience.
177. The world cares little for principles. They care for persons.
178. Man’s free agency is not of the mind, for that is bound. There is no freedom there.
179. With the Holy Mother as the centre of inspiration, a Math is to be established on the eastern bank of the Ganga. . . . On the other side of the Ganga a big plot of land will be acquired, where unmarried girls or Brahmacharini widows will live; devout married women will also be allowed to stay now and then. Men will have no concern with this Math.
180. Shri Krishna says: “Better die in your own path than attempt the path of another.”
181. We have none of us seen a form which had not a beginning and will not have an end.
182. Jnana teaches that the world should be given up, but not on that account to be abandoned. To be in the world but not of it-is the true test of the sannyasin.
183. Meditation is a sort of prayer and prayer is meditation. The highest meditation is to think of nothing. If you can remain one moment without thought, great power will come.
184. Each nation has a main current in life; in India it is religion. Make it strong and the waters on either side must move along with it. This is one phase of my line of thought. In time, I hope to bring them all out, but at present I find I have a mission in this country also. Moreover, I expect help in this country and from here alone. But up to date I could not do anything except spreading my ideas. Now I want that a similar attempt be made in India.
185. Spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centred in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then society has to help itself, and materialism comes to the rescue.
186. Religion is the peculiarity of the growth of the Indian mind.
187. Women will work out their destinies — much better, too, than men can ever do for them. All the mischief to women has come because men undertook to shape the destiny of women.
188. If I, as an Oriental have to worship Jesus of Nazareth, there is only one way, that is, to worship him as God and nothing else.
189. Mark, therefore, the ordinary theory of practical religion, what it leads to. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism. It is not religion. It is no better than atheism – a little less.
190. Liberty in thought and action is the only condition of life, growth and well-being: Where it does not exist, the man, the race, and the nation must go down.
191. Every Hindu knows that astrologers try to fix the caste of every boy or girl as soon as he or she is born. That is the real caste – the individuality, and Jyotisha (astrology) recognises that. And we can only rise by giving it full sway again. This variety does not mean inequality, nor any special privilege.
192. We are suffering from our own Karma. It is not the fault of God. What we do is our own fault, nothing else. Why should God be blamed?. . .
193. The older I grow, the more I see behind the idea of the Hindus that man is the greatest of all beings.
194. The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.
195. Change can only be in the limited.
196. Mankind ought to be taught that religions are but the varied expressions of THE RELIGION, which is Oneness, so that each may choose the path that suits him best.
197. Turn thy gaze inward, wherein resides the Supreme Self.
198. Your way is the best for you, but that is no sign it is the best for another.
199. It is a retarding element creating hatred and anger, and causing people to fight each other, and making them unsympathetic.
200. It is the highest manifestation of the power of Vairagya when it takes away even our attraction towards the qualities.
201. We must travel; we must go to foreign parts. We must see how the engine of society works in other countries, and keep free and open communication with what is going on in the minds of other nations, if we really want to be a nation again.
202. This earth is higher than all the heavens; this is the greatest school in the universe.
203. Love makes no distinction between man and man, between an Aryan and a Mlechchha, between a Brâhmana and a Pariah, nor even between a man and a woman. Love makes the whole universe as one’s own home. True progress is slow but sure. Work among those young men who can devote heart and soul to this one duty – the duty of raising the masses of India. Awake them, unite them, and inspire them with this spirit of renunciation; it depends wholly on the young people of India.
204. When the last moment arrives, praise and blame will be the same to you, to me, and to others. We are here to work, and will have to leave all when the call comes.
205. It is good and very grand to conquer external nature, but grander still to conquer our internal nature…. This conquering of the inner man, understanding the secrets of the subtle workings that are within the human mind, and knowing its wonderful secrets, belong entirely to religion.
206. Cowards never win victories. We have to fight fear and troubles and ignorance if we expect them to flee before us
207. Change is inherent in every form.
208. The subtle are the causes, the gross the effects.
209. Every change is being forced upon us.
210. We find the vast majority of people in every country believing that there will be a time when this world will become perfect, when there will be no disease, nor death, nor unhappiness, nor wickedness. That is a very good idea, a very good motive power to inspire and uplift the ignorant. But if we think for a moment, we shall find on the very face of it that it cannot be so. How can it be, seeing that good and evil are the obverse and reverse of the same coin? How can you have good without evil at the same time?
211. We must always remember that God is Love. “A fool indeed is he who, living on the banks of the Ganga, seeks to dig a little well for water. A fool indeed is the man who, living near a mine of diamonds, spends his life in searching for beads of glass.” God is that mine of diamonds. We are fools indeed to give up God for legends of ghosts or flying hobgoblins. It is a disease, a morbid desire.
212. He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. “Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life.” Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. “He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life.”
213. Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.
214. If there is one word that you find coming out like a bomb from the Upanishads, bursting like a bombshell upon masses of ignorance, it is the word “fearlessness.”
215. Man only remains hypnotised with the false idea of an ego. When this ghost is off from us, all dreams vanish, and then it is found that the one Self only exists from the highest Being to a blade of grass.
216. Man as Atman is really free; as man he is bound, changed by every physical condition.
217. The effect is delusion, and therefore the cause must be delusion.
218. The Pariahs, our fellow beings, ought to be educated by the higher castes.
219. Preaching has always been the business of the Asiatics. The Western people are grand in organisation, social institutions, armies, governments, etc.; but when it comes to preaching religion, they cannot come near the Asiatic, whose business it has been all the time, and he knows it, and he does not use too much machinery.
220. Do any deserve liberty who are not ready to give it to others? Let us calmly go to work, instead of dissipating our energy in unnecessary fretting and fuming.
221. Are you unselfish? That is the question. If you are, you will be perfect without reading a single religious book, without going into a single church or temple.
222. In a day, when you don’t come across any problems – you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path.
223. When we suffer, it is because of our own acts; God is not to be blamed for it.
224. Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain.
225. The Jivanmukta (‘the living free’ or one who knows) alone is able to give real love, real charity, real truth, and it is truth alone that makes us free.
226. Cowardice is no virtue.
227. If you are angry, and then happy, the next moment the anger passes away. Out of that anger you manufactured the next state. These states are always interchangeable. Eternal happiness and misery are a child’s dream.
228. Our minds are forced to become fixed upon different things by an attraction in them which we cannot resist. To control the mind, to place it just where we want it, requires special training. It cannot be done in any other way. In the study of religion the control of the mind is absolutely necessary. We have to turn the mind back upon itself in this study.
229. The Hindus have a peculiar slovenliness in business matters, not being sufficiently methodical and strict in keeping accounts etc.
230. Man has infinite power within himself, and he can realise it – he can realise himself as the one infinite Self. It can be done; but you do not believe it. You pray to God and keep your powder dry all the time.
231. I must remark that what I mean by our religion working upon the nations outside of India comprises only the principles, the background, the foundation upon which that religion is built.
232. Renunciation is always the ideal of every race; only other races do not know what they are made to do by nature unconsciously.
233. There is another way in which this idea of mercy and selfless charity can be put into practice; that is, by looking upon work as “worship” in case we believe in a Personal God. Here we give up all the fruits our work unto the Lord, and worshipping Him thus, we have no right to expect anything from man kind for the work we do.
234. Marriage and sex and money the only living devils.
235. Through the senses, anger comes, and sorrow comes.
236. Even if our every attempt is a failure, and we bleed and are torn asunder, yet, through all this, we have to preserve our heart – we must assert our Godhead in the midst of all these difficulties.
237. It is fear that is the cause of our woes, and it is fearlessness that brings heaven in a moment “The earth is enjoyed by heroes” – this is the unfailing truth.
238. Change is always subjective.
239. Renounce and give up. What did Christ say? “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” Again and again did he preach renunciation as the only way to perfection. There comes a time when the mind awakes from this long and dreary dream-the child gives up its play and wants to go back to its mother. Renunciation is not asceticism. Are all beggars Christ? Poverty is not a synonym for holiness; often the reverse.
240. The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified.
241. You are the creator of your own destiny.
242. There is only one Soul in the Universe. There is no ‘you’ or ‘me’; all variety is merged into the absolute unity, the one infinite existence – God.
243. Take up an idea, devote yourself to it, struggle on in patience, and the sun will rise for you.
244. Dependence is misery. Independence is happiness.
245. The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.
246. No one is ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion, which arouses the internal teacher, who helps us to understand things.
247. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
248. Say, “I can do everything .” “Even if poison of a snake is powerless if you can firmly deny it.”
249. Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, and fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in the world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.
250. We, we, and none else, are responsible for what we suffer. We are the effects, and we are the causes.
251. This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse anything outside, not to lay the blame upon anyone outside, but stand up, lay the blame on yourself. You will find that is always true. Get hold of yourself.
252. These births and deaths are changes in nature which we are mistaking for changes in us.
253. This misery that I am suffering is of my own doing, and that very thing proves that it will have to be undone by me alone.
254. Take any path you like; follow any prophet you like; but have only that method which suits your own nature, so that you will be sure to progress.
255. May the shadow of the Almighty ever rest on all those you love.
256. It is the subjective world that rules the objective. Change the subject, and the object is bound to change; purify youreslf, and the world is bound to be purified.
257. I, for one, thoroughly believe that no power in the universe can withhold from anyone anything they really deserve.
258. Have faith in yourself. You people were once the Vedic Rishis. Only, you have come in different forms, that’s all. I see it clear as daylight that you all have infinite power in you. Rouse that up; arise, arise – apply yourselves heart and soul, gird up your loins.
259. Marriage is the truest goal for ninety-nine per cent of the human race, and they will live the happiest life as soon as they have learnt and are ready to abide by the eternal lesson – that we are bound to bear and forbear and that life to every one must be a compromise.
260. Purity, patience and perseverance are the three essentials to success and above all love.
261. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind.
262. Watch people do their most common actions; these are indeed the things that will tell you the real character of a great person.
263. Each soul is a star and all stars are set in the infinite azure, the eternal sky-the Lord.
264. If a thing happens once, it can happen again. If any human being has ever realised perfection, we too can do so. If we cannot become perfect here and now, we never can in any state or heaven or condition we may imagine.
265. Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.
266. The calm man is not the man who is dull. You must not mistake Sattva for dullness or laziness. The calm man is the one who has control over the mind waves. Activity is the manifestation of inferior strength, calmness, of the superior.
267. No one step back, that is the idea…. Fight it out, whatever comes. Let the stars move from the sphere! Let the whole world stand against us!…. What of it? Thus fight! You gain nothing by becoming cowards…. Taking a step backward, you do not avoid any misfortune.
268. Anything that makes weak – physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.
269. Give up all self, all egotisms get out of anger, lust, give all to God. “I am not, but Thou art; the old man is all gone, only Thou remainest.” “I am Thou.” Blame none; if evil comes, know the Lord is playing with you and be exceeding glad.
270. . . . Wait, my child, wait and work on. Patience, patience. . . . .
271. Persevere on, my brave lads, We have only just begun. Never despond! Never say enough!
272. While real perfection is only one, relative perfections must be many.
273. All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue.
274. We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life.
275. Let people say whatever they like, stick to your own convictions, and rest assured, the world will be at your feet. They say, “Have faith in this fellow or that fellow”, but I say, “Have faith in yourself first”, that’s the way. Have faith in yourself-all power is in you-be conscious and bring it out. Say, “I can do everything.”
276. What is this universe but name and form?
278. This, I have seen in life – those who are overcautious about themselves fall into dangers at every step. Those who are afraid of losing honor and respect, get only disgrace; and those who are always afraid of loss, always lose.
279. We cannot see outside what we are not inside. The universe is to us what the huge engine is to the miniature engine; and indication of any error in the tiny engine leads us to imagine trouble in the huge one.
280. Soft-brained people, weak-minded, chicken-hearted , cannot find the truth. One has to be free, and as broad as the sky.
281. All great undertakings are achieved through mighty obstacles. Keep up the deepest mental poise. Take not even the slightest notice of what puerile creatures may be saying against you.
282. We do not look at our own faults; the eyes do not see themselves, they see the eyes of everybody else. We human beings are very slow to recognise our own weakness, our own faults, so long as we can lay the blame upon somebody else.
283. Meditate upon the Om that is in the heart.
284. A wave in the ocean is a wave, only in so far as it is bound by name and form.
285. We must have friendship for all; we must be merciful toward those that are in misery; when people are happy, we ought to be happy; and to the wicked we must be indifferent. These attitudes will make the mind peaceful.
286. Let me die fighting. Two years of physical suffering have taken from me twenty years of life. But the soul changes not, does it? It is there, the same madcap – Atman – mad upon one idea, intent and intense.
287. One point of difference between Hinduism and other religions is that in Hinduism we pass from truth to truth-from a lower truth to a higher truth-and never from error to truth.
288. Om is the pointed piece and Dhyâna (meditation) is the friction.
289. “Why should I become angry just because another man has made a fool of himself. Do thou resist not evil!” That is what the lovers of God say. Whatever the world does, wherever it goes, has no influence [on them].
290. We want today that bright sun of intellectuality joined with the heart of Buddha, the wonderful infinite heart of love and mercy. This union will give us the highest philosophy.
291. Each one of us reaps what we ourselves have sown. These miseries under which we suffer, these bondages under which we struggle, have been caused by ourselves, and none else in the universe is to blame. God is the least to blame for it.
292. The day, man will find that he never really dies; that his Soul persists beyond death; he will have no more fear of death.
293. Oh, if only you knew yourselves! You are souls; you are Gods. If ever I feel like blaspheming, it is when I call you man.
294. Realisation of love can never come so long as there is the least desire in the heart, or what Shri Ramakrishna used to say, attachment for Kâma-Kânchana (sense-pleasure and wealth). In the perfect realisation of love, even the consciousness of one’s own body does not exist. Also, the supreme Jnana is to realise the oneness everywhere, to see one’s own self as the Self in everything. That too cannot come so long as there is the least consciousness of the ego (Aham).
295. The human soul has sojourned in lower and higher forms, migrating from one to another according to the samskaras or impressions, but it is only in the highest form as a human being that it attains to freedom.
296. Those that only take a nibble here and a nibble there will never attain anything … Those who really want to be yogis must give up, once and for all, this nibbling at things. Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life – think of it, dream of it, live on that idea.
297. Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind.
298. The body is only a tool of the mind. What the mind dictates the body will have to obey. Now I do not even think of water. I do not miss it at all…. I see I can do anything.
299. Faith in ourselves will do everything. I have experienced it in my own life, and am still doing so; and as I grow older that faith is becoming stronger and stronger. He is an atheist who does not believe in himself. The old religions said that he was an atheist who did not believe in God. The new religion says that he is the atheist who does not believe in himself.
300. He in whose mind is no anger, hatred, or envy, who never loses his balance, dies, or is born, who is he but God?
301. You have the right to work, but do not become so degenerate as to look for results. Work incessantly, but see something behind the work. Even good deeds can find a man in great bondage. Therefore be not bound by good deeds or by desires for name and fame.
302. Only when a man sees this universe as God does the veil fall from his eyes; then that man, purified and cleansed, finds his whole vision changed.
303. Throw aside your scriptures in the Ganga and teach the people first the means of procuring their food and clothing, and then you will find time to read to them the scriptures.
304. The weak have no place here, in this life or any other life. Weakness leads to slavery. Weakness leads to all kinds of misery, physical and mental. Weakness is death.
305. You are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. You divinities on earth. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; you are not matter, you are not bodies; matter is your servant,not you the servant of matter.
306. In the primal state before any manifestation, when there was no motion but perfect balance, this Prakriti was indestructible, because decomposition or death comes from instability or change.
307. I hate cowardice; I will have nothing to do with cowards or political nonsense.
308. The perfect man sees nothing but God.
309. Siva, O Siva, carry my boat to the other shore!
310. Be strong, get beyond all superstitions, and be free.
311. You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds.
312. Every soul is destined to be perfect, and every being, in the end, will attain the state of perfection.
313. Karma is the eternal assertion of human freedom. . . . Our thoughts, our words, and deeds are the threads of the net which we throw around ourselves.
314. When we free ourselves from name and form, especially from a body – when we need no body, good or bad – then only do we escape from bondage. Eternal progression is eternal bondage; annihilation of form is to be preferred. We must get free from any body, even a “god-body”. God is the only real existence, there cannot be two. There is but One Soul, and I am That.
315. Freedom can never be true of name and form; it is the clay out of which we (the pots) are made; then it is limited and not free, so that freedom can never be true of the related. One pot can never say “I am free” as a pot; only as it loses all ideas of form does it become free.
316. We must not forget that what I mean by the conquest of the world by spiritual thought is the sending out of the life-giving principles, not the hundreds of superstitions that we have been hugging to our breasts for centuries.
317. Every little bit, every atom inside the universe, is in a constant state of change and motion, but the universe as a whole is unchangeable, because motion or change is a relative thing; we can only think of something in motion in comparison with something which is not moving.
318. …oneness is the secret to everything.
319. If there’s a God, we must see him and if there’s a soul we must perceive it. Otherwise, it’s better not to believe.
320. Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but purity, living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realisation. Let there be a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world.
321. The great Vaishnava religion of India has also sprung from a Tamil Pariah – Shathakopa – “who was a dealer in winnowing-fans but was a Yogin all the while”.
322. Avoid all mystery. There is no mystery in religion.
323. To the Indian mind there is nothing higher than religious ideals, that this is the keynote of Indian life.
324. Let us not depend upon the world for pleasure.
325. As soon as a man stands up and says he is right or his church is right, and all others are wrong, he is himself all wrong. He does not know that upon the proof of all the others depends the proof of his own. Love and charity for the whole human race, that is the test of true religiousness. I do not mean the sentimental statement that all men are brothers, but that one must feel the oneness of human life.
326. These practices – non-killing, truthfulness, non-stealing, chastity, and non-receiving – are to be practised by every man, woman, and child; by every soul, irrespective of nation, country, or position.
327. Help and not fight. Assimilation and not destruction. Harmony and Peace and not dissension.
328. Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?
329. They aimless halt, who halt for others.
330. The world is a demon. It is a kingdom of which the puny ego is king. Put it away and stand firm.
331. Ahimsa (non-killing), truthfulness, purity, mercy, and godliness are always to be kept.
332. The body and mind are continually changing, and are, in fact, only names of series of changeful phenomena, like rivers whose waters are in a constant state of flux, yet presenting the appearance of unbroken streams. Every particle in this body is continually changing; no one has the same body for many minutes together, and yet we think of it as the same body.
333. All the superior religions had their growth between the Ganga and the Euphrates.
334. Even the lowest of the Hindus, the Pariah, has less of the brute in him than a Briton in a similar social status.
335. But on the heights of the Himalayas I have a place where I am determined nothing shall enter except pure truth. There I want to work out this idea about which I have spoken to you today. There are an Englishman and an Englishwoman in charge of the place. The purpose is to train seekers of truth and to bring up children without fear and without superstition. They shall not hear about Christs and Buddhas and Shivas and Vishnus – none of these.
336. Present-day Hinduism and Buddhism were growths from the same branch. Buddhism degenerated, and Shankara lopped it off!
337. My boat is nearing the calm harbour from which it is never more to be driven out. Glory, glory unto Mother! (Referring to the Divine Mother of the Universe.) I have no wish, no ambition now. Blessed be Mother! I am the servant of Ramakrishna. I am merely a machine. I know nothing else. Nor do I want to know.
338. “None is good, save One, that is, God”, as the Lord Jesus bath said. The rest are only tools in His hands. “Gloria in Excelsis”, “Glory unto God in the highest”, and unto men that deserve, but not to such an undeserving one like me. Here “the servant is not worthy of the hire”; and a Fakir, especially, has no right to any praise whatsoever, for would you praise your servant for simply doing his duty?
339. Despondency is not religion, whatever else it may be.
340. The Vedanta recognizes no sin it only recognizes error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that.
341. Motion is always a relative thing. I move in relation to something else. Any particle in this universe can change in relation to any other particle; but take the whole universe as one, and in relation to what can it move? There is nothing besides it. So this infinite Unit is unchangeable, immovable, absolute, and this is the Real Man.
342. Well has it been said that man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards; every other animal naturally looks down.
343. Be not afraid , for all great power throughout the history of humanity has been with the people. From out of their ranks have come all the greatest geniuses of the world, and history can only repeat itself. Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvellous work.
344. Jiva (individual soul) is the conscious ruler of this body, in whom the five life principles come into unity, and yet that very Jiva is the Atman, because all is Atman.
345. The only way to study the mind is to get at facts, and then intellect will arrange them and deduce the principles.
346. Just as the body has its progress and decadence, so also has the mind, and, therefore, the mind is not the soul, because the soul can neither decay nor degenerate.
347. Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language.
348. The person is only a phenomenon, the principle is behind it. Thus from both sides, simultaneously, we find the breaking down of personalities and the approach towards principles, the Personal God approaching the Impersonal, the personal man approaching the Impersonal Man.
349. Stamping down the weakness of mind and heart, stand up, saying, “I am possessed of heroism, I am possessed of a steady intellect…” Never allow weakness to overtake your mind.
350. The human will stands beyond all circumstances. Everything must go down before the will, for that comes from God Himself; a pure and a strong will is omnipotent. Before it all the powers, even of nature, must bow down, succumb, and become its servants – the strong gigantic, infinite will in man.
351. We get caught. How? Not by what we give but by what we expect. We get misery in return for our love: not from the fact that we love but from the fact that we want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery.
352. The progress of the world through all its evils making it fit for the ideals, slowly but surely.
353. No effect of work can be eternal.
354. The more we grow in Love, Virtue and Holiness, the more we see Love, Virtue and Holiness outside.
355. A Sannyasin cannot belong to any religion, for his is a life of independent thought, which draws from all religions; his is a life of realisation, not merely of theory or belief, much less of dogma.
356. I could not for my soul distinguish ever the distinction between “religious anger” and “commonplace anger”, “religious killing” and “commonplace killing”, “religious slandering and irreligious”, and so forth.
357. Each atom is trying to fly off from its centre. In the internal world, each thought is trying to go beyond control. Again each particle in the external world is checked by another force, the centripetal, and drawn towards the centre. Similarly in the thought – world the controlling power is checking all these outgoing desires.
358. Truth alone triumphs, not untruth. Through truth alone lies the way to Devayana (the way to the gods). Those who think that a little sugar – coating of untruth helps the spread of truth are mistaken and will find in the long run that a single drop of poison poisons the whole mass … The man who is pure, and who dares, does all things.
359. Who will bring light to the poor? Who will travel from door to door bringing education to them? Let these people be your God-think of them, work for them, pray for them incessantly. The Lord will show you the way.
360. Those reformers who preach against image-worship, or what they denounce as idolatry – to them I say “Brothers, if you are fit to worship God-without-form discarding all external help, do so, but why do you condemn others who cannot do the same?”
361. This world, this universe which our senses feel, or our mind thinks, is but one atom, so to say, of the Infinite, projected on to the plane of consciousness; and within that narrow limit, defined by the network of consciousness, works our reason, and not beyond. Therefore, there must be some other instrument to take us beyond, and that instrument is called inspiration.
362. [Perfection] is only possible if the mind of man is changed, if he, of his own sweet will, changes his mind; and the great difficulty is, neither can he force his own mind.
363. Calm and silent and steady work, and no newspaper humbug, no name-making, you must always remember.
364. The cause being finite, the effect must be finite. If the cause is eternal the effect can be eternal, but all these causes, doing good work, and all other things, are only finite causes, and as such cannot produce infinite result.
365. The body and mind are dependent.
366. Strength, strength is what the Upanishads speak to me from every page. This is the one great thing to remember, it has been the one great lesson I have been taught in my life; strength, it says, strength, O man, be not weak. Are there no human weaknesses? – says man. There are, say the Upanishads, but will more weakness heal them, would you try to wash dirt with dirt? Will sin cure sin, weakness cure weakness? Strength, O man, strength, say the Upanishads, stand up and be strong.
367. Whether you bathe in the Ganga for a thousand years or live on vegetable food for a like period, unless it helps towards the manifestation of the Self, know that it is all of no use.
368. The sculptor, the painter the musician the dancer, or any artist, if he can first obtain celebrate in Paris, acquires very easily the esteem and eulogy of other countries.
369. If you want to be a yogi, you must be free, and place yourself in circumstances where you are alone and free from all anxiety. One who desires a comfortable and nice life and at the same time wants to realize the Self is like the fool who, wanting to cross the river, caught hold of a crocodile, mistaking it for a log of wood.
370. Salvation never will come through hope of reward.
371. Hold on to your own ideal. . . . Above all, never attempt to guide or rule others, or, as the Yankees say, “boss” others. Be the servant of all.
372. There cannot be any form unless it is the result of force and matter; and all combinations must dissolve.
373. All growth, progress, well – being, or degradation is but relative.
374. You nourish your minds by reading books. There is no good in doing that unless you hold it also as a sacrifice to the whole world. For the whole world is one; you are rated a very insignificant part of it, and therefore it is right for you that you should serve your millions of brothers rather than aggrandise this little self.
375. Bold words and bolder deeds are what we want. Awake, awake, great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you sleep?
376. What is marriage but the renunciation of unchastity? The savage does not marry. Man marries because he renounces.
377. Renunciation is the background of all religious thought wherever it be, and you will always find that as this idea of renunciation lessens, the more will the senses creep into the field of religion, and spirituality will decrease in the same ratio.
378. Jesus Christ was willing to admit every good man to the family of God. It is not the man who believes a certain something, but the man who does the will of the Father in heaven, who is right. On this basis-being right and doing right-the whole world can unite.
379. For a time it seemed inevitable that the surging tide of agnosticism and materialism would sweep all before it. There were those who did not dare utter what they thought. Many thought the case hopeless and the cause of religion lost once and for ever. But the tide has turned and to the rescue has come – what? The study of comparative religions. By the study of different religions we find that in essence they are one.
380. To be more free is the goal of all our efforts, for only in perfect freedom can there be perfection.
381. Internal and external nature, mind and matter, are in time and space, and are bound by the law of causation.
382. “There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of woman is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on only one wing.
There is no hope for that family or country where there is no estimation of women, where they live in sadness. For this reason, they have to be raised first.”
383. It is a constant change. Not one body is constant.
384. No great work can be achieved by humbug. It is through love, a passion for truth, and tremendous energy, that all undertakings are accomplished.
385. It is contrary to our principles to multiply organizations, since, in all conscience, there are enough of them. And when organizations are created they need individuals to look after them.
386. To weep is a sign of weakness, of bondage.
387. We are the sons of Light and children of God. Glory unto the Lord, we will succeed.
388. All real progress must be slow.
389. There is no salvation for man until he sees God, realises his own soul.
390. Do not disturb the faith of any. . . Our duty is not to disturb the faith of others.
391. The body is subject to the law of growth and decay, what grows must of necessity decay.
392. If you want to live, go back to Christ. You are not Christians. Go back to Christ. Go back to him who had nowhere to lay his head. Better be ready to live in rags with Christ than to live in palaces without him.
393. Do not lower your goals to the level of your abilities. Instead, raise your abilities to the height of your goals.
394. We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
395. All power is within you. Believe in that,do not believe that you are weak… Stand up and express the Divinity within you.
396. The remedy for weakness is not brooding over weakness, but thinking of strength.
397. When a man is perfect, he sees perfection in others. When he sees imperfection, it is his own mind projecting itself.
398. If you have knowledge and see a man weak, do not condemn him. Go to his level and help him if you can. He must grow.
399. The moment you fear, you are nobody.
400. Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you, but do not think of that now.
401. Do not say we are weak; we can do anything and everything. What can we not do? Everything can be done by us; we all have the same glorious soul, let us believe in it.
402. According to the Hindu way of thinking, marriage is rather a duty than a privilege.
403. Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible – and this is Art.
404. In this body, He resides, the Lord of souls and the King of kings.
405. Expansion is life. Love is expansion. Love is therefore the only law of life.
406. Thank God for giving you this world as a moral gymnasium to help your development, but never imagine you can help the world.
407. Everything that has form must have a beginning and an end.
408. Never lose faith in yourself; you can do anything in the universe.
409. Education is not filling the mind with a lot of facts. Perfecting the instrument and getting complete mastery of my own mind [is the ideal of education].
410. Religion is realization; not talk, nor doctrine, nor theories however beautiful they may be. It is being and becoming, not hearing, or acknowledging; it is the whole soul becoming what it believes.
411. The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.
412. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Where goest thou to seek for the Kingdom of God, asks Jesus of Nazareth, when it is there, within you? Cleanse the spirit, and it is there. It is already yours. How can you get what is not yours? It is yours by right. You are the heirs of immortality, sons of the Eternal Father.
413. A brave, frank, clean-hearted, courageous and aspiring youth is the only foundation on which the future nation can be built.
414. He whose book of the heart has been opened needs no other books.
415. The sky never changes: it is the cloud that is changing.
416. This is the one great idea to understand that our power is already ours, our salvation is already within us.
417. Do not say, ‘You are bad’; say only, ‘You are good’, but be better!
418. All work is simply to bring out the power of the mind which is already there, to wake up the soul. The power is inside every man, so is knowing; the different works are like blows to bring them out, to cause these giants to wake up.
419. Even the least work done for others awakens the power within; even thinking the least good of others gradually instills into the heart the strength of a lion.
420. Be strong , my young friends; that is my advice to you. You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the Gita. These are bold words; but I have to say them, for I love you. I know where the shoe pinches.
421. Arise! Awake! and stop not until the goal is reached.
422. First, believe in the world – that there is meaning behind everything.
423. Liberty is the first condition of growth. It is wrong, a thousand times wrong, if any of you dares to say, ‘I will work out the salvation of this woman or child.
424. Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth.
425. It is good to love God for hope of reward, but it is better to love God for love’s sake; and the prayer goes: O Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth. But grant me this, that I may love thee without the hope of reward ‘love’ unselfishly for love’s sake.
426. The weak, the fearful, the ignorant will never reach the Atman. You cannot undo what you have done; the effect must come. Face it, but be careful never to do the same thing again. Give up the burden of all deeds to God. Give all, both good and bad. God helps those who do not help themselves.
427. . . . it is difficult for Europeans to appreciate the sentiment. Other nations kill animals by wholesale and kill one another; they exist in a sea of blood. A European said that the reason why in India animals were not killed was because it was supposed that they contained the spirits of ancestors. This reason was worthy of a savage nation who are not many steps from the brute.
428. The ideal of faith in ourselves is of the greatest help to us. If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished. Throughout the history of mankind, if any motive power has been more potent than another in the lives of all great men and women, it is that of faith in themselves.
429. Throw overboard all idea of jealousy and egotism, once for all. Come on to the practical field with tremendous energy; to work, in the fullness of strength! As to the rest, the Lord will point out the way.
430. I hate this world, this dream, this horrible nightmare, with its churches and chicaneries, its books and blackguardisms, its fair faces and false hearts, its howling righteousness on the surface and utter hollowness beneath and, above all, its sanctified shopkeeping!
431. Have faith in man, whether he appears to you to be a very learned one or a most ignorant one. Have faith in man, whether he appears to be an angel or the very devil himself. Have faith in man first, and then having faith in him, believe that if there are defects in him, if he makes mistakes, if he embraces the crudest and the vilest doctrines, believe that it is not from his real nature that they come, but from the want of higher ideals.
432. Man always is perfect, or he never could become so; but he had to realise it.
433. Beware of compromises. I do not mean that you are to get into antagonism with anybody, but you have to hold on to your own principles in weal or woe and never adjust them to others’ “fads” through the greed of getting supporters. Your Âtman is the support of the universe – whose support do you stand in need of? Wait with patience and love and strength; if helpers are not ready now, they will come in time. Why should we be in a hurry? The real working force of all great work is in its almost unperceived beginnings.
434. There is no virtue higher than non-injury.
435. The great lesson is, that unity is behind all. Call it God, Love, Spirit. Allah, Jehovah – it is the same unity that animates all life from the lowest animal to the noblest man.
436. This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world.
437. Get up, and set your shoulder to the wheel – How long is this life for? As you have come into this world, leave some mark behind. Otherwise, where is the difference between you and the trees and stones? They too come into existence, decay and die.
438. Man never dies, nor is he ever born; bodies die, but he never dies.
439. Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin; to say that you are weak, or others are weak.
440. Every atom is working and resisting every thought in the mind. Everything we see and know is but the resultant of these two forces.
441. Learn to feel yourself in other bodies, to know that we are all one. Throw all other nonsense to the winds. Spit out your actions, good or bad, and never think of them again. What is done is done. Throw off superstition. Have no weakness even in the face of death. Be free.
442. Yes, the words of the Mother can be heard as clearly as we hear one another. But one requires a fine nerve to hear Mother’s words.
443. Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come. So fulfill your desire for power and everything else, and after you have fulfilled the desire, will come the time when you will know that they are all very little things; but until you have fulfilled this desire, until you have passed through that activity, it is impossible for you to come to the state of calmness, serenity, and self-surrender.
444. Whenever we attain a higher vision, the lower vision disappears of itself.
445. Try a little harder, and meditation comes. You do not feel the body or anything else. When you come out of it after the hour, you have had the most beautiful rest you ever had in your life. That is the only way you ever give rest to your system. Not even the deepest sleep will give you such a rest as that.
446. Have fire and spread all over. Work, work. Be the servant while leading, be unselfish, and never listen to one friend in private accusing another. Have infinite patience, and success is yours.
447. Purity, perseverance, and energy- these three I want.
448. Do you know this Sanskrit Shloka: “Let those who are versed in the ethical codes praise or blame, let Lakshmi, the goddess of Fortune, come or go wherever she wisheth, let death overtake him today or after a century, the wise man never swerves from the path of rectitude.” Let people praise you or blame you, let fortune smile or frown upon you, let your body fall today or after a Yuga, see that you do not deviate from the path of Truth.
449. In one sense Brahman is known to every human being; he knows, “I am”; but man does not know himself as he is.
450. I am one of the proudest men ever born, but let me tell you frankly, it is not for myself, but on account of my ancestry. The more I have studied the past, the more I have looked back, more and more has this pride come to me, and it has given me the strength and courage of conviction, raised me up from the dust of the earth, and set me working out that great plan laid out by those great ancestors of ours.
451. The nearer we are to God, the less we will have occasions to cry or weep. The further we are from God, the more will long faces come. The more we know God, the more misery vanishes.
452. The God which cannot give me food in this world, cannot give me Heaven in the other world.
453. I fervently wish no misery ever came near anyone; yet it is that alone that gives us an insight into the depths of our lives, does it not? In our moments of anguish, gates barred forever seem to open and let in many a flood of light.
454. Unselfishness is God. One may live on a throne, in a golden palace, and be perfectly unselfish; and then he is in God. Another may live in a hut and wear rags, and have nothing in the world; yet, if he is selfish, he is intensely merged in the world.
455. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Can we see God? Of course not. Can we know God? Of course not. If God can be known, He will be God no longer. Knowledge is limitation. But I and my Father are one: I find the reality in my soul. These ideas are expressed in some religions, and in others only hinted. In some they were expatriated. Christ’s teachings are now very little understood in this country. If you will excuse me, I will say that they have never been very well understood.
456. Not believing in the glory of our own soul is what the Vedanta calls atheism.
457. I am persuaded that a leader is not made in one life. He has to be born for it. For the difficulty is not in organisation and making plans; the test, the real test, of the leader, lies in holding widely different people together along the line of their common sympathies. And this can only be done unconsciously, never by trying.
458. Until we realise ourselves as the Absolute, we cannot attain to deliverance.
459. Principles must conquer in the long run, for that is the manhood of man.
460. Look here — we shall all die! Bear this in mind always, and then the spirit within will wake up. Then only, meanness will vanish from you, practicality in work will come, you will get new vigour in mind and body, and those who come in contact with you will also feel that they have really got something uplifting from you.
461. The apparent man is only a limitation of that Real Man.
462. It is too often believed that a person in his progress towards perfection passes from error to truth; that when he passes on from one thought to another, he must necessarily reject the first. But no error can lead to truth. The soul passing through its different stages goes from truth to truth, and each stage is true; it goes from lower truth to higher truth.
463. The Absolute God of the universe, the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe, is impersonal principle.
464. “You are pure and perfect, and what you call sin does not belong to you”. Sins are low degrees of Self-manifestation; manifest your Self in a high degree.
465. Anything that is secret and mysterious in this system of Yoga should be at once rejected. The best guide in life is strength. In spirituality, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you. Have nothing to do with it. Mystery-mongering weakens the human brain. It has well-nigh destroyed Yoga, one of the grandest of sciences
466. Say it with pride we are Hindus.
467. If there be no eternal life, still the enjoyment of spiritual thoughts as ideals is keener and makes a man happier, whilst the foolery of materialism leads to competition and undue ambition and ultimate death, individual and national.
468. Do you think there is any other means of achieving progress except through Rajas?
469. Motion is the sign of life.
470. I love my nation, I cannot see you degraded, weakened any more than you are now. Therefore I am bound for your sake and for truth’s to cry, “Hold!” and to raise my voice against this degradation of my race. Give up these weakening mysticism and be strong.
471. This World will always continue to be a mixture of Good and Evil. Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to Love even the wrongdoer.
472. Sri Ramakrishna is far greater than the disciples understand him to be. He is the embodiment of infinite spiritual ideas capable of development in infinite ways….One glance of his gracious eyes can create a hundred thousand Vivekanandas at this instant. If he chooses now, instead, to work through me, making me his instrument, I can only bow to his will.
473. My son, there is no rest for me. That which Sri Ramakrishna called “Kali” took possession of my body and soul three or four days before his passing away. That makes me work and work and never lets me keep still or look to my personal comfort.
474. We want Shraddhâ, we want faith in our own selves. Strength is life, weakness is death. ‘We are the Âtman, deathless and free; pure, pure by nature. Can we ever commit any sin? Impossible!’ – such a faith is needed. Such a faith makes men of us, makes gods of us. It is by losing this idea of Shraddha that the country has gone to ruin.
475. Children of those ancient Aryans, through the grace of the Lord may you have the same pride, may that faith in your ancestors come into your blood, may it become a part and parcel of your lives, may it work towards the salvation of the world!
476. It is the duty of every person to contribute in the development and progress of India.
477. This idea of body is a simple superstition. It is superstition that makes us happy or unhappy. It is superstition caused by ignorance that makes us feel heat and cold, pain and pleasure.
478. I remember that grand word of the Katha Upanishad – Shraddhâ or marvellous faith. An instance of Shraddha can be found in the life of Nachiketâ. To preach the doctrine of Shraddha or genuine faith is the mission of my life. Let me repeat to you that this faith is one of the potent factors of humanity and of all religions. First, have faith in yourselves.
479. The moment you think creed and form and ceremony the “be-all” and “end-all”, then you are in bondage. Take part in them to help others, but take care they do not become a bondage.
480. Moths like me die by the thousands every minute. Her work goes on all the same. Glory unto Mother!
481. Religion and religion alone is the life of India, and when that goes India will die, in spite of politics, in spite of social reforms, in spite of Kubera’s wealth poured upon the head of every one of her children.
482. Everything that has name and form must begin in time, exist in time, and end in time. These are settled doctrines of the Vedanta, and as such the heavens are given up.
483. The coward is an object to be pitied.
484. I have seen some astrologers who predicted wonderful things; but I have no reason to believe they predicted them only from the stars, or anything of the sort. In many cases it is simply mind-reading. Sometimes wonderful predictions are made, but in many cases it is arrant trash.
485. Ignorance is death, Knowledge is life.
486. A certain motion becomes understood when it is referred to a force; certain sensations, to matter; certain changes outside, to law; certain changes in thought, to mind; certain order singly, to causation – and joined to time, to law.
487. Materialism prevails in Europe today. You may pray for the salvation of the modern sceptics, but they do not yield, they want reason.
488. Liberty is the first condition of growth. Your ancestors gave every liberty to the soul, and religion grew. They put the body under every bondage, and society did not grow. The opposite is the case in the West – every liberty to society, none to religion. Now are falling off the shackles from the feet of Eastern society as from those of Western religion.
489. Religion is being and becoming. Religion is the manifestation of the Divinity already in man.
490. Each nation has its own peculiar method of work. Some work through politics, some through social reforms, some through other lines. With us, religion is the only ground along which we can move.
491. If Jesus Christ was not perfect, then the religion bearing his name falls to the ground.
492. From attachment comes longing, and longing breeds anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion, confused memory. From confused memory comes the ruin of discrimination; and from the ruin of discrimination, a man perishes.
493. How absurd to take the credit of doing the good act on oneself and lay the blame for the evil act on the Lord!
494. All that is real in me is God; all that is real in God is I. The gulf between God and me is thus bridged. Thus by knowing God, we find that the kingdom of heaven is within us.
495. The highest manifestation of strength is to keep ourselves calm and on our own feet.
496. Each nation has an identity and destiny. As far as Bharat is concerned, Hindu is its identity and religion is its way of working.
497. Each soul is potentially divine.
498. The world sympathizes only with strong and powerful.
497. There cannot be friendship without equality.
498. This external worship of images has, however, been described in all our Shastras as the lowest of all the low forms of worship. But that does not mean that it is a wrong thing to do.
499. Blows are what awaken us & help to break the dream. They show us the insufficiency of this world & make us long to escape, to have freedom.
450. Who shall make me perfect? I am perfect already.
451. Man is not mind, he is soul.
452. There cannot be a cause without an effect, the present must have had its cause in the past and will have its effect in the future.
453. Do you believe in that Infinite, good Providence working in and through you? If you believe that this Omnipresent One is present in every atom, is through and through, Ota-Prota, as the Sanskrit word goes, penetrating your body, mind and soul, how can you lose heart?
454. Have faith in Guru, in his teachings, and in the surety that you can get free. Think day and night that this universe is zero, only God is. Have intense desire to get free.
455. The one who actually succeeds in making himself believe that he is having a good time is the man of splendid physical health.
456. First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods. “Be and make.” Let this be our motto. Say not man is a sinner. Tell him that he is a God. Even if there were a devil, it would be our duty to remember God always, and not the devil.
457. No doubt it is an evil to be bound by laws, but it is necessary at the immature stage to be guided by rules; in other words, as the Master used to say that the sapling must be hedged round, and so on.
458. When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work.
459. Man has wanted to look beyond, wanted to expand himself; and all that we call progress, evolution, has been always measured by that one search, the search for human destiny, the search for God.
460. No more materialism, no more this egoism, I must become spiritual.
461. Is there any sex-distinction in the Atman (Self)? Out with the differentiation between man and woman—all is Atman! Give up the identification with the body, and stand up!
462. You have heard that Christ said, ‘My words are spirit and they are life’. So are my words spirit and life; they will burn their way into your brain and you will never get away from them!
463. Nature grinds all of us. Keep count of the ounce of pleasure you get. In the long run, nature did her work through you, and when you die your body will make other plants grow. Yet we think all the time that we are getting pleasure ourselves. Thus the wheel goes round.
464. Everything that occupies space has form. The formless can only be infinite.
465. The secret of image – worship is that you are trying to develop your vision of Divinity in one thing.
466. This perfection must come through the practice of holiness and love.
467. Arise! Arise! A tidal wave is coming! Onward! Men and women, down to the Chandala (Pariah) – all are pure in his eyes. Onward! Onward! There is no time to care for name, or fame, or Mukti, or Bhakti! We shall look to these some other time. Now in this life let us infinitely spread his lofty character, his sublime life, his infinite soul. This is the only work – there is nothing else to do.
468. “If you die, you get to heaven; and if you win, you enjoy the earth” (Gita). Even if you die in this attempt, well and good, many will take up the work, following your example. And if you succeed, you will live a life of great opulence.
469. As thou thinkest, so art thou.
470. The very idea of an infinite in place would be a contradiction in terms, as a place must begin and continue in time.
471. “Learn good knowledge with all devotion from the lowest caste. Learn the way to freedom, even if it comes from a Pariah, by serving him. If a woman is a jewel, take her in marriage even if she comes from a low family of the lowest caste.” Such is the law laid down by our great and peerless legislator, the divine Manu.
472. In every attempt there are many obstacles to cope with, but gradually the path becomes smooth.
473. It is very difficult to understand why in this country [India] so much difference is made between men and women, whereas the Vedanta declares that one and the same conscious Self is present in all beings. You always criticize the women, but say what have you done for their uplift? Writing down Smritis etc., and binding them by hard rules, the men have turned the women into manufacturing machines! If you do not raise the women, who are living embodiment of the Divine Mother, don’t think that you have any other way to rise.
474. Happiness presents itself to man, wearing the crown of sorrow on its head. He who welcomes it must also welcome sorrow.
475. There is no end to renunciation.
476. The body is the external coating and the mind is the internal coating of the Atman who is the real perceiver, the real enjoyer, the being in the body who is working the body by means of the internal organ or the mind.
477. The Trinitarian Christ is elevated above us; the Unitarian Christ is merely a moral man; neither can help us. The Christ who is the Incarnation of God, who has not forgotten His divinity, that Christ can help us, in Him there is no imperfection.
478. If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better.
479. When I Asked God for Strength He Gave Me Difficult Situations to Face When I Asked God for Brain & Brawn He Gave Me Puzzles in Life to Solve When I Asked God for Happiness He Showed Me Some Unhappy People When I Asked God for Wealth He Showed Me How to Work Hard When I Asked God for Favors He Showed Me Opportunities to Work Hard When I Asked God for Peace He Showed Me How to Help Others God Gave Me Nothing I Wanted He Gave Me Everything I Needed.
480. Real freedom is not merely doing what you like, but also NOT doing what you like.
481. He who has no faith in himself can never have faith in God.
482. Test everything, try everything, and then believe it, and if you find it for the good of many, give it to all.
483. True progress is slow but sure.
484. He who has conquered the internal nature controls the whole universe; it becomes his servant.
485. Whatever you believe, that you will be. If you believe yourselves to be sages, sages you will be tomorrow. There is nothing to obstruct you.
486. Be Grateful to the Man you help, think of Him as God. Is it not a great privilege to be allowed to worship God by helping our fellow men?
487. The power of meditation gets us everything. If you want to get power over nature, [you can have it through meditation]. It is through the power of meditation all scientific facts are discovered today. They study the subject and forget everything, their own identity and everything, and then the great fact comes like a flash.
488. The real man is the one Unit Existence.
489. The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: the man or woman who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish person, is the most successful.
490. Accumulate power in silence and become a dynamo of spirituality.
491. “Comfort” is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being “comfortable”.
492. There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm you have built a cocoon around yourself…. Burst your own cocoon and come out as the beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth.
493. Truth, purity, and unselfishness wherever these are present, there is no power below or above the sun to crush the possessor thereof. Equipped with these, one individual is able to face the whole universe in opposition.
494. We do not progress from error to truth, but from truth to truth.
495. Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.
496. God is present in every Jiva; there is no other God besides that. Who serves Jiva serves God indeed.
497. Every action generates a force of energy that returns to us in like kind…what we sow is what we reap.
498. Don’t look back—forward, infinite energy, infinite enthusiasm, infinite daring, and infinite patience—then alone can great deeds be accomplished.
499. Advance like a hero. Do not be thwarted by anything. How many days will this body last, with its happiness and misery? When you have the human body, then rouse the Atman within and say-I have reached the state of fearlessness!…and then as long as the body endures, speak unto others this message of fearlessness: ‘Thou art That’, ‘Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached’
500. One way for attaining Bhakti is by repeating the name of God a number of times. Mantras have effect: the mere repetition of words…. To obtain Bhakti, seek the company of holy men who have Bhakti, and read books like the Gita and the Imitation of Christ; always think of the attributes of God.
501. Give me few men and women who are pure and selfless and I shall shake the world.
502. Three things are necessary to make every man great,every nation great1.Conviction of the powers of goodness.2.Absence of jealousy and suspicion.3.Helping all who are trying to be and do good.
503. Even books are nurses, medicines are nurses. But we must work to bring about the time when man shall recognise his mastery over his own body. Herbs and medicines have power over us as long as we allow them; when we become strong, these external methods are no more necessary.
504. The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.
505. All power is within you; you can do anything and everything. Believe in that, do not believe that you are weak; do not believe that you are half-crazy lunatics, as most of us do nowadays. You can do anything and everything without even the guidance of any one.
506. Be perfectly resigned, perfectly unconcerned; then alone can you do any true work. No eyes can see the real forces; we can only see the results. Put out self, forget it; just let God work, it is HIS business.
507. The greatest help to spiritual life is meditation. In meditation we divest ourselves of all material condition and feel our divine nature.
508. The secret of karma yoga which is to perform actions without any fruitive desires is taught by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita.
509. We first observe facts, then generalise, and then draw conclusions or principles.
510. Shri Ramakrishna use to say, “As Long as I Live, so long do I learn”. That man or that society which has nothing to learn is already in the jaws of death.
511. Take off the veil of hypnotism which you have cast upon the world, send not out thoughts and words of weakness unto humanity.
512. If in this hell of a world one can bring a little joy and peace even for a day into the heart of a single person, that much alone is true; this I have learnt after suffering all my life; all else is mere moonshine.
513. All the forces that are working in this body have been produced out of food; we see that every day.
514. We have not faith, we have not patience to see this. We trust the man in the street; but there is one being in the universe we never trust and that is God. We trust Him when He works just our way. But the time will come when, getting blow after blow, the self – sufficient mind will die. In everything we do, the serpent ego is rising up. We are glad that there are so many thorns on the path. They strike the hood of the cobra.
515. The happiest is the man who is not at all selfish.
516. Know this also to be one of the spiritual practices, a discipline for God – realisation. Its aim also is Self – realisation.
517. He who knows even how to prepare a smoke properly, knows also how to meditate. And he who cannot cook well cannot be a perfect sannyasin. Unless cooking is performed with a pure mind and concentration, the food is not palatable.
518. Shivaji was the greatest Hindu king that India had produced within the last thousand years; one who was the very incarnation of lord Siva, about whom prophecies were given out long before he was born; and his advent was eagerly expected by all the great souls and saints of Maharashtra as the deliverer of the Hindus from the hands of the Mlecchas, and as one who succeeded in the reestablishment of Dharma which had been trampled underfoot by the depredations of the devastating hordes of the Moghals
519. This is a great fact: strength is life; weakness is death. Strength is felicity, life eternal, immortal; weakness is constant strain and misery, weakness is death.
520. If the whole responsibility is thrown upon our own shoulders, we shall be at our highest and best; when we have nobody to grope towards, no devil to lay our blame upon, no Personal God to carry our burdens, when we are alone responsible, then we shall rise to our highest and best. I am responsible for my fate, I am the bringer of good unto myself, I am the bringer of evil.
521. You cannot teach a child any more than you can grow a plant. All you can do is on the negative side – you can only help. It is a manifestation from within; it develops its own nature – you can only take away obstructions.
522. You may meditate on whatever you like, but I shall meditate on the heart of a lion. That gives strength.
523. The whole universe is composed of name and form. Whatever we see is either a compound of name and form, or simply name with form which is a mental image.
524. Had I lived in Palestine, in the days of Jesus of Nazareth, I would have washed his feet, not with my tears, but with my heart’s blood!
525. In these days of intellectual awakening and steadily asserting public opinion, the holy places of the Hindus, their condition, and method of work have not escaped tile keen eye of criticism; and this city, being the holy of holies to all Hindus, has not failed to attract its full share of censure.
526. I have a message for the world, which I will deliver without fear and care for the future. To the reformers I will point out that I am a greater reformer than any one of them. They want to reform only little bits. I want root-and-branch reform.
527. If you dare declare that you are free, free you are this moment. If you say you are bound, bound you will remain.
528. Astrology and all these mystical things are generally signs of a weak mind; therefore as soon as they are becoming prominent in our minds, we should see a physician, take good food, and rest.
529. Let us give out of our own bounty, just as God gives to us.
530. The essence of Vedanta is that there is but one Being and that every soul is that Being in full, not a part of that Being.
531. Die in obeying commands like a soldier, and go to Nirvana, but no cowardice.
532. If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better.
533. We have lost faith in ourselves. Therefore to preach the Advaita aspect of the Vedanta is necessary to rouse up the hearts of men, to show them the glory of their souls. It is therefore that I preach this Advaita, and I do so not as a sectarian, but upon universal and widely acceptable grounds.
534. Some men, who begin by saying that the world is a hell, often end by saying that it is a heaven when they succeed in the practice of self-control.
535. In the world take always the position of the giver.
536. The one eternal religion is applied to the opinions of various minds and various races. There never was my religion or yours, my national religion or your national religion; there never existed many religions, there is only the one. One infinite religion existed all through eternity and will ever exist, and this religion is expressing itself in various countries in various ways.
537. Thirst after body is the great bane of human life.
538. After every happiness comes misery; they may be far apart or near. The more advanced the soul, the more quickly does one follow the other. What we want is neither happiness nor misery. Both make us forget our true nature; both are chains-one iron, one gold; behind both is the Atman, who knows neither happiness nor misery. These are states, and states must ever change; but the nature of the Atman is bliss, peace, unchanging. We have not to get it, we have it; only wash away the dross and see it.
539. The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence.
540. One who leans on others cannot serve the God of Truth.
541. My child, what I want is muscles of iron and nerves of steel, inside which dwells a mind of the same material as that of which the thunderbolt is made.
542. Religion is the one and sole interest of the people of India.
543. The sign of vigour, the sign of life, the sign of hope, the sign of health, the sign of everything that is good, is strength. As long as the body lives, there must be strength in the body, strength in the mind, [and strength] in the hand.
544. Every one is as much bound in thought, word, deed, and mind, as a piece of stone or this table. That I talk to you now is as rigorous in causation as that you listen to me. There is no freedom until you go beyond Maya. That is the real freedom of the soul.
545. The guiding motive of mankind should be charity towards men, charity towards all animals.
546. This caste system had grown by the practice of the son always following the business of the father.
547. One link in a chain explains the infinite chain.
548. Have faith that you are all, my brave lads, born to do great things! Let not the barks of puppies frighten you, no, not even the thunderbolts of heaven, but stand up and work!
549. Who makes us ignorant? We ourselves. We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark.
550. There is, however, only one idea of duty which has been universally accepted by all mankind, of all ages and sects and countries, and that has been summed up in a Sanskrit aphorism thus: “Do not injure any being; not injuring any being is virtue, injuring any being is sin.”
551. The vapour becomes snow, then water, then Ganga; but when it is vapour, there is no Ganga, and when it is water, we think of no vapour in it. The idea of creation or change is inseparably connected with will. So long as we perceive this world in motion, we have to conceive will behind it.
552. It is the Prana that is manifesting as motion.
553. Perfection is not to be attained, it is already within us.
554. The ideal person is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert.
555. Society is an organism which obeys the immutable law of progress; and change, judicious and cautious change, is necessary for the well being, and indeed the preservation of the social system.
556. The greatest help to spiritual life is meditation.
557. Some imaginations help to break the bondage of the rest. The whole universe is imagination, but one set of imaginations will cure another set. Those that tell us that there is sin and sorrow and death in the world are terrible. But the other set – thou art holy, there is God, there is no pain – these are good, and help to break the bondage of the others. The highest imagination that can break all the links of the chain is that of the Personal God.
558. We are slaves in the hands of nature – slaves to a bit of bread, slaves to praise, slaves to blame, slaves to wife, to husband, to child, slaves to everything.
559. Who can break the law? If I break this glass, it will fall down. If anyone succeeds in throwing one atom out of place, every other atom will go out of balance. . . . The law can never be broken. Each atom is kept in its place. Each is weighed and measured and fulfils its [purpose] and place. Through His command the winds blow, the sun shines. Through His rule the worlds are kept in place. Through His orders death is sporting upon the earth. Just think of two or three Gods having a wrestling match in this world! It cannot be.
560. In Tibet there is no marriage, and there is no jealousy, yet we know that marriage is a much higher state. The Tibetans have not known the wonderful enjoyment, the blessing of chastity, the happiness of having a chaste, virtuous wife, or a chaste, virtuous husband. These people cannot feel that. And similarly they do not feel the intense jealousy of the chaste wife or husband, or the misery caused by unfaithfulness on either side, with all the heart-burnings and sorrows which believers in chastity experience. On one side, the latter gain happiness, but on the other, they suffer misery too.
561. The West regards marriage as consisting in all that lies beyond the legal tie, while in India it is thought of as a bond thrown by society round two people to unite them together for all eternity. Those two must wed each other, whether they will or not, in life after life. Each acquires half of the merit of the other. And if one seems in this life to have fallen hopelessly behind, it is for the other only to wait and beat time, till he or she catches up again!
562. Give up bondage; become a son, be free, and then you can “see the Father”, as did Jesus.
563. This is the ancient land, where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country… Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the feet of the greatest sages that ever lived… Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal fountains that are behind, and after that look forward, march forward, and make India brighter, greater, much higher, than she ever was.
564. Accumulation of power is as necessary as its diffusion, or rather more so.
565. Be strong, my young friends; that is my advice to you.
566. Hinduism threw away Buddhism after taking its sap. The attempt of all the Southern Acharyas was to effect a reconciliation between the two. Shankaracharya’s teaching shows the influence of Buddhism. His disciples perverted his teaching and carried it to such an extreme point that some of the later reformers were right in calling the Acharya’s followers “crypto-buddhists”.
567. I ask you all so earnestly to open girl’s schools in every village and try to uplift them. If the Conditions of women are raised, then their children will, by their noble actions, glorify the name of the Country.
568. Satisfied is no test of truth. Actuality is steadily far from idiosyncratic secure.
569. Hinduism is the mother of all religions.
570. This life is a tremendous assertion of freedom.
571. The Absolute cannot be worshipped, so we must worship a manifestation.
572. In art, interest must be centred on the principal theme.
573. We have wept enough. No more weeping, but stand on feet and be men.
574. Christ’s public life extended only over eighteen months, and for this he had silently been preparing himself for thirty – two years.
575. Is God to blame for what I myself have done?
576. Compared to the coward that never made the attempt, he is a hero.
578. Every action that helps us manifest our divine nature more and more is good; every action that retards it is evil.
579. The wave is the same thing as the water, the effect is the cause in another form
580. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.
581. There are men who practice Titiksha, and succeed in it. There are men who sleep on the banks of the Ganga in the midsummer sun of India, and in winter float in the waters of the Ganga for a whole day; they do not care. Men sit in the snow of the Himalayas, and do not care to wear any garment. What is heat? What is cold? Let things come and go, what is that to me, I am not the body.
582. Whenever two particles come together, they are held by a certain attraction; and there will come a time when those particles will separate. This is the eternal law. So, wherever there is a body – either grosser or finer, either in heaven or on earth – death will overcome it.
583. Stick to God! Who cares what comes to the body or to anything else! Through the terrors of evil, say-my God, my love! Through the pangs of death, say-my God, my love! Through all the evils under the sun, say-my God, my love! Thou art here, I see Thee. Thou art with me, I feel Thee. I am Thine, take me. I am not of the world’s but Thine, leave not then me.
584. It will be a great pity if any feeling of jealousy or egotism gain ground amongst you.
585. A form comes out of a combination of force and matter.
586. Nobody has a right now to say that the Hindus are not liberal to a fault.
587. We can form no idea of the millions of pounds that are spent every year in the making of dress in the West. The dress-making business has become a regular science. What colour of dress will suit with the complexion of the girl and the colour of her hair, what special feature of her body should be disguised, and what displayed to the best advantage-these and many other like important points, the dressmakers have seriously to consider. Again, the dress that ladies of very high position wear, others have to wear also, otherwise they lose their caste! This is FASHION.
588. Whom anger chains, can ever pass thro’ Maya’s gates.
589. As long as we believe ourselves to be even the least different from God, fear remains with us; but when we know ourselves to be the One, fear goes; of what can we be afraid.?
590. Nothing is gained except by sacrifice…. Do not degrade it to the level of the brutes…. Make yourselves decent men! … Be chaste and pure! … There is no other way. Did Christ find any other way?
591. “I loved my motherland dearly before I went to America and England.
After my return, every particle of dust of this land seems sacred to me.”
592. Bullies are always cowards.
593. My son, hold fast! Do not care for anybody to help you. Is not the Lord infinitely greater than all human help? Be holy–trust in the Lord, depend on him always, and you are on the right track. Nothing can prevail against you.
594. Today the West is awakening to its wants; and the “true self of man and spirit” is the watchword of the advanced school of Western theologians. The student of Sanskrit philosophy knows where the wind is blowing from, but it matters not whence the power comes so longs as it brings new life.
595. Man is the apex of the only world we can ever know.
596. Be proud that thou art an Indian, and proudly proclaim, “I am an Indian, every Indian is my brother.” Say, “The ignorant Indian, the poor and destitute Indian, the Brahmin Indian, the Pariah Indian, is my brother.”
597. From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hinduism religion.
598. God is pure, and the same to all.
599. The fault with all religions like Christianity is that they have one set of rules for all. But Hindu religion is suited to all grades of religious aspiration and progress. It contains all the ideals in their perfect form. For example, the ideal of Shanta or blessedness is to be found in Vasishtha; that of love in Krishna; that of duty in Rama and Sita; and that of intellect in Shukadeva. Study the characters of these and of other ideal men. Adopt one which suits you best.
600. This world is not for cowards.
601. All change is in the screen.
602. whatever you think that you will be. if you think yourself weak, weak you will be; if you think yourself strong, you will be.
603. We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.
604. To succeed, you must have tremendous perserverance… tremendous will. “I will drink the ocean”, says the perservering soul; at my will mountains will crumble. Have that sort of energy, that sort of will; work hard, and you will reach the goal.
605. Your success is not measured in terms of what all you obtained but in term of what you become, how you live and what actions you do. Upon this point reflect well and attain great happiness.
606. You must keep a strict eye on your health; let everything else be subordinated to that.
607. If you really want to judge the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Watch a man do his most common actions.
608. There is no happiness higher than what a man obtains by this attitude of non-offensiveness, to all creation.
609. As soon as extreme attachment comes, a man loses himself, he is no more master of himself, he is a slave.
610. Faith is not belief, it is the grasp on the Ultimate, an illumination.
611. Why should a Man be Moral? Because this strengthens his will.
612. Books are infinite in number and time is short. The secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it.
613. We want to worship a living God. I have not seen anything but God all my life, nor have you… He is everywhere, saying, “I am.” The moment you feel “I am,” you are conscious of Existence. Where shall we go to find God if we cannot see Him in our own hearts and in every living being?
614. Let us blame none, let us blame our own Karma.
615. Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it be after his heart. But the intelligent man is he who can convert every work into one that suits his taste. No work is petty. Everything in this world is like a banyan seed, which, though appearing tiny as a mustard seed, has yet the gigantic banyan tree latent with it. He indeed is intelligent who notices this and succeeds in making all work truly great.
616. We must plunge heart and soul and body into the work. And until we are ready to sacrifice everything else to one Idea and to one alone, we never, never will see the Light.
617. Here lies the secret. Says Patanjali, the father of Yoga, “When a man rejects all the superhuman powers, then he attains to the cloud of virtue.” He sees God. He becomes God and helps others to become the same. This is all I have to preach. Doctrines have been expounded enough. There are books by the million. Oh, for an ounce of practice!
618. Where no bondage is, there is no cause and effect.
619. Every wave of passion restrained is a balance in your favor. It is therefore good policy not to return anger for anger, as with all true morality.
620. God is always God, but the views which people and nations may take of him vary. No higher view is known than that of love.
621. Do you have the belief in you to move on, even when the whole world is against you, with swords in their hands?
622. When I asked God for strength, He gave me difficult situations to face.
623. All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love’s sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.
624. Be brave! Be strong! Be fearless! Once you have taken up the spiritual fife, fight! Fight as long as there is any life in you! Even though you know that you are going to be killed, fight till you are killed! Don’t die of fright! Die fighting! Don’t go down till you are knocked down.
625. Out of purity and silence comes the word of power.
626. Strength, strength it is that we want so much in this life, for what we call sin and sorrow have all one cause, and that is our weakness. With weakness comes ignorance, and with ignorance comes misery.
627. Man can become like God and acquire control over the whole universe if he multiplies infinitely his centre of self-consciousness.
628. True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action.
629. According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already.
630. Science, art, learning and metaphysical research all have their proper functions in life, but if you seek to blend them, you destroy their individual characteristics until, in time, you eliminate the spiritual, for instance, from the religious altogether.
631. They alone live, who live for others.
632. Let him who has courage in his mind and love in his heart come with me. I want none else.
633. I am inclined to believe that one who is a coward will be born after death as an insect or a worm, that there is no salvation for a coward even after millions of years of penance.
634. Is enjoyment the goal of life? Were it so, it would be a tremendous mistake to become a man at all. What man can enjoy a meal with more gusto than the dog or the cat ? Go to a menagerie and see the [wild animals] tearing the flesh from the bone. Go back and become a bird! . . . What a mistake then to become a man! Vain have been my years – hundreds of years – of struggle only to become the man of sense-enjoyments.
635. The body cannot be the soul.
636. We should cultivate the optimistic temperament, and endeavour to see the good that dwells in everything. If we sit down and lament over the imperfection of our bodies and our minds, we profit nothing; it is the heroic endeavour to subdue adverse circumstances that carries our spirit upward.
637. It is not that Christ is superior to Allah, not that Allah is everything and Brahma is nothing, but it is the same one whom you call either Brahma or Allah, or Almighty, or by a hundred other names. The names are different but God is one and the same.
638. I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there.
639. Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism.
640. In Shankaracharya we saw tremendous intellectual power, throwing the scorching light of reason upon everything.
641. At the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One through whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth. And what is His nature? He is everywhere the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All Merciful. Thou art our Father. Thou art our beloved Friend.
642. The banyan tree does not mean awakening, nor does the hill, nor the saint, nor the European couple. The lotus is a symbol of regeneration.
643. Ordinary love is mere animal attraction. Otherwise why is the distinction between the sexes? If one kneels before an image, it is dreadful idolatry; but if one kneels before husband or wife, it is quite permissible!
644. Stand in that reverent attitude to the whole universe, and then will come perfect non attachment.
645. Books are only made so that they may point the way to a higher life; but no good results unless the path is trodden with unflinching steps!
646. Those giants of old, the ancient Rishis, who never walked but strode, of whom if you were to think but for a moment you would shrivel up into a moth, they sir, had time-and you have no time!
647. Books cannot teach God, but they can destroy ignorance; their action is negative.
648. Those who work at a thing heart and soul not only achieve success in it but through their absorption in that they also realize the supreme truth-Brahman. Those who work at a thing with their whole heart receive help from God.
649. The devil comes in many guises-anger in the form of justice-passion in the form of duty. When it first comes, the man knows and then he forgets. Just as your pleaders’ conscience; at first they know it is all Badmashi (roguery), then it is duty to their clients; at last they get hardened.
650. Good and evil thoughts are each a potent power, and they fill the universe.
651. The idea of God grew side by side with the idea of materialism.
652. The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil – doers, only adds to the evil in the world.
653. I believe that the Hindu faith has developed the spiritual in its devotees at the expense of the material, and I think that in the Western world the contrary is true. By uniting the materialism of the West with the spiritualism of the East I believe much can be accomplished. It may be that in the attempt the Hindu faith will lose much of its individuality.
654. To be unselfish, perfectly selfless, is salvation itself; for the man within dies, and God alone remains.
655. First, meditation should be of a negative nature. Think away everything. Analyse everything that comes in the mind by the sheer action of the will. Next, assert what we really are-existence, knowledge, and bliss-being, knowing, and loving.
656. I am not talking about what every one of us means by love. Little namby-pamby love is lovely. Man rails in love with woman, and woman goes to die for man. The chances are that in five minutes John kicks Jane, and Jane kicks John. This is a materialism and no love at all. If John could really love Jane, he would be perfect that moment.
657. Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented before us by the great sage Valmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster, none more beautiful, and at the same time simpler, than the language in which the great poet has depicted the life of Rama.
658. Cut the bondage of all worldly affections; go beyond laziness and all care as to what becomes of you.
659. Who cares for your bhakti and mukti? Who cares what your scriptures say? I will go into a thousand hells cheerfully if I can rouse my countrymen, immersed in tamas, to stand on their own feet and be men inspired with the spirit of karma-yoga. I am a follower only of he or she who serves and helps others without caring for his own bhakti and mukti!
660. Last of all will come self-surrender. Then we shall be able to give ourselves up to the Mother. If misery comes, welcome; if happiness comes, welcome. Then, when we come up to this love, all crooked things shall be straight. There will be the same sight for the Brahmin, the Pariah, and the dog. Until we love the universe with samesightedness, with impartial, undying love, we are missing again and again. But then all will have vanished, and we shall see in all the same infinite eternal Mother.
661. Hindu Dharma is the quintessence of our national life, hold fast to it if you want your country to survive, or else you would be wiped out in three generations.
662. We must get out of materialism.
663. To many, Indian thought, Indian manners; Indian customs, Indian philosophy, Indian literature are repulsive at the first sight; but let them persevere, let them read, let them become familiar with the great principles underlying these ideas, and it is ninety-nine to one that the charm will come over them, and fascination will be the result. Slow and silent, as the gentle dew that falls in the morning, unseen and unheard yet producing a most tremendous result, has been the work of the calm, patient, all-suffering spiritual race upon the world of thought.
664. Your country requires heroes; be heroes; your duty is to go on working, and then everything will follow of itself.
665. Non-injuring has to be attained by him who would be free. No one is more powerful than he who has attained perfect non-injuring. No one could fight, no one could quarrel, in his presence. Yes, his very presence, and nothing else, means peace, means love wherever he may be. Nobody could be angry or fight in his presence. Even the animals, ferocious animals, would be peaceful before him.
666. It is practice first, and knowledge afterwards.
667. When I asked God for Brains and Brawn, He gave me Puzzles in life to Solve.
668. Have faith. We will do.
669. When an idea exclusively occupies the mind, it is transformed into an actual physical or mental state.
670. We never change, we never die, and we are never born.
671. Go and preach to all, ‘Arise, awake, sleep no more: within each of you there is the power to remove all wants and all miseries. Believe this, and that power will be manifested.
672. The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is, therefore, Mukti – freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery.
673. If you intend to study the mind, you must have systematic training; you must practice to bring the mind under your control, to attain to that consciousness from which you will be able to study the mind and remain unmoved by any of its wild gyrations. Otherwise the facts observed will not be reliable; they will not apply to all people and therefore will not be truly facts or data at all.
674. Until we give up the world manufactured by the ego, never can we enter the kingdom of heaven. None ever did, none ever will.
675. Know for certain that there is no power in the universe to injure us unless we first injure ourselves.
676. That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.
677. It is an irrational claim to believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ and at the same time to hold that the greater part of his teachings have no application at the present time. If you say that the reason why the powers do not follow them that believe (as Christ said they would) is because you have not faith enough and are not pure enough-that will be all right. But to say that they have no application at the present time is to be ridiculous.
678. This is the principle of Universal Brotherhood of man with one another, with all life down to the little ants.
679. “Free thyself from the mighty attraction-
The maddening wine of love, the charm of sex.
Break the harp! Forward, with the ocean’s cry!. . .”
680. When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply.
681. The Land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards generosity, towards purity, towards calmness – it is India.
682. The Vedas give information on various subjects. They have come together and form one book. And in later times, when other subjects were separated from religion – when astronomy and astrology were taken out of religion – these subjects, being connected with the Vedas and being ancient, were considered very holy.
683. The Imitation of Christ is a cherished treasure of the Christian world. This great book was written by a Roman Catholic monk. “Written”, perhaps, is not the proper word. It would be more appropriate to say that each letter of the book is marked deep with the heart’s blood of the great soul who had renounced all for his love of Christ.
684. Every step I take in light is mine forever.
685. In spirituality the Americans are very inferior to us. But their society is very superior to ours.
686. Let the end and the means be joined into one.
687. Every artist paints his Madonna according to his own pre-conceived ideas.
688. For the next fifty years this alone shall be our keynote – this, our great Mother India. Let all other vain gods disappear for the time from our minds. This is the only god that is awake, our own race – “everywhere his hands, everywhere his feet, everywhere his ears, he covers everything.” All other gods are sleeping. What vain gods shall we go after and yet cannot worship the god that we see all round us, the Virât? When we have worshiped this, we shall be able to worship all other gods.
689. To work with undaunted energy! What fear! Who is powerful enough to thwart you.
690. We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man’s character changes.
691. The only test of goods things is that they make us strong.
692. The test of Ahimsa is absence of jealousy.
693. The body is mortal and the mind is mortal; both, being compounds, must die.
694. By doing well the duty which is nearest to us, the duty which is in our hands now, we make ourselves stronger; and improving our strength in this manner step by step, we may reach a state in which it shall be our privilege to do the most coveted and honored duties in life and in society.
695. Christians are always wanting God to give them something. They appear as beggars before the throne of the Almighty.
696. Say So’ham, So’ham whatever comes. Tell yourself this even in eating, walking, suffering. Tell the mind this incessantly-that what we see never existed, that there is only I. Flash-the dream will break! Think day and night, this universe is zero, only God is. Have intense desire to get free.
697. This ego – the less there is of it, the nearer I am to that which I really am: the universal body.
698. The Indian idea is that the soul is formless. Whatever is form must break some time or other.
699. To believe that mind is all, that thought is all is only a higher materialism.
700. The “ego” like its correlative “non-ego”, is the product of the body, mind etc. The only proof of the existence of the real Self is realisation.
701. Renunciation means that none can serve both God and Mammon.
702. This doctrine of prenatal influence is now slowly being recognized, and science as well as religion calls out: ‘Keep yourself holy, and pure.’ So deeply has this been recognized in India, that there we even speak of adultery in marriage, except when marriage is consummated in prayer.
703. The idol is the expression of religion.
704. Infinite power of the spirit, brought to bear upon matter evolves material development, made to act upon thought evolves intellectuality, and made to act upon itself makes of man a God. First, let us be Gods, and then help other to be GOds. Be and Make. Let this be our motto.
705. This is the great lesson that we are here to learn through myriads of births and heavens and hells – that there is nothing to be asked for, desired for, beyond one’s spiritual Self (atman).
706. Get rid of the bondage of body; we have become slaves to it and learnt to hug our chains and love our slavery; so much so that we long to perpetuate it, and go on with “body” “body” for ever. Do not cling to the idea of “body”, do not look for a future existence in any way like this one; do not love or want the body, even of those dear to us.
707. There is implanted in every man, naturally, a strong desire for progress.
708. In all our Yogas this renunciation is necessary. This is the stepping-stone and the real centre and the real heart of all spiritual culture – renunciation. This is religion – renunciation.
709. March on, the Lord is our General.
710. Every individual is a center for the manifestation of a certain force. This force has been stored up as the resultant of our previous works, and each one of us is born with this force at our back.
711. No freedom without renunciation.
712. We are bound to earth by desire and also to God, heaven, and the angels. A slave is a slave whether to man, to God, or to angels.
713. In a day, when you don’t come across any problems – you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path.
714. Take Risks in Your Life If you Win, U Can Lead! If You Lose, You can Guide!
715. The history of the world is the history of a few men who had faith in themselves.
716. As soon as we react, we become slaves. A man blames me, and I immediately react in the form of anger. A little vibration which he created made me a slave.
717. In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart.
718. Whatever you think, that you will be.
719. We have to keep the body in good health; we have to take care of what we eat and drink, and what we do.
720. All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.
721. The road to salvation is through truth.
722. Every idea has to become broad till it covers the whole of this world, every aspiration must go on increasing till it has engulfed the whole of humanity, nay, the whole of life, within its scope.
723. The greatest truths are the simplest things in the world, simple as your own existence.
724. Art is – representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.
725. The greatest force is derived from the power of thought. The finer the element, the more powerful it is. The silent power of thought influences people even at a distance, because mind is one as well as many. The universe is a cobweb; minds are spiders.
726. What is salvation? To live with God. Where? Anywhere. Here this moment. One moment in infinite time is quite as good as any other moment.
727. Never turn back to see the result of what you have done. Give all to the Lord and go on, and think not of it.
728. All practice or worship is only for taking off this veil. When that will go, you will find that the Sun of Absolute Knowledge is shining in Its own lustre.
729. Each man must begin where he stands, must learn how to control the things that are nearest to him.
730. Our best work is done, our greatest influence is exerted, when we are without thought of self.
731. The will is not free – it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect – but there is something behind the will which is free.
732. This life is a hard fact; work your way through it boldly, though it may be adamantine; no matter, the soul is stronger.
733. All truth is eternal. Truth is nobody’s property; no race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all souls.
734. The same power is in every man, the one manifesting more, the other less; the same potentiality is in everyone.
735. The greatest sin is to think that you are weak. No one is greater: realize that you are Brahman. Nothing has power except what you give it.
736. Do not run away, it is cowardice.
737. It is impossible to think about the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is impossible for a bird to fly on only one wing.
738. To me an Indian is one who has got a Vedantic brain which probes deep and soars high; an Islamic body that is vibrant and valiant; a Buddhistic heart overflowing with compassion and kindness and Christian limbs of service and sacrifice.
739. Work and worship are necessary to take away the veil, to lift off the bondage and illusion.
740. The Hindus have to learn a little bit of materialism from the West and teach them a little bit of spirituality.
741. All motion in this universe is in the form of waves, successively rising and falling.
742. What do you gain in heaven? You become gods, drink nectar, and get rheumatism. There is less misery there than on earth, but also less truth.
743. Each man has a mission in life, which is the result of all his infinite past Karma.
744. The soul … is nameless because it is formless. It will neither go to heaven nor [to hell] any more than it will enter this glass.
745. All the forces that we see in nature, such as gravitation, attraction, and repulsion, or as thought, feeling, and nervous motion – all these various forces resolve into that Prana, and the vibration of the Prana ceases. In that state it remains until the beginning of the next cycle. Prana then begins to vibrate, and that vibration acts upon the Akasha, and all these forms are thrown out in regular succession.
746. We are the makers of our own lives. There is no such thing as fate. Our lives are the result of our previous actions, our karma, and it naturally flows that, having been ourselves the makers of our karma, we must also be able to unmake it.
747. Know that every time you feel weak, you not only hurt yourself but also the cause. Infinite faith and strength are the only conditions of success.
748. Man will have to go beyond intellect in the end.
749. Well has it been said that man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards; every other animal naturally looks down. That looking upward and going upward and seeking perfection are what is called salvation; and the sooner a man begins to go higher, the sooner he raises himself towards this idea of truth as salvation.
750. The law of attraction which holds good for the heavenly bodies also holds good for the smallest particles.
751. A golden chain is as much a chain as an iron one. Shri Ramakrishna used to say that, to pick out one thorn which has stuck into the foot, another thorn is requisitioned, and when the thorn is taken out, both are thrown away. So the bad tendencies are to be counteracted by the good ones, but after that, the good tendencies have also to be conquered.
752. Where you find the attraction for lust and wealth considerably diminished, to whatever creed he may belong, know that his inner spirit is awakening.
753. We must approach religion with reverence and with love, and our heart will stand up and say, this is truth, and this is untruth.
754. It is nature that is driving us towards perfection, and eventually she will bring everyone there.
755. Faith, sympathy – fiery faith and fiery sympathy! Life is nothing, death is nothing, hunger nothing, cold nothing. Glory unto the Lord – march on, the Lord is our General. Do not look back to see who falls – forward – onward! Thus and thus we shall go on, brethren. One falls, and another takes up the work.
756. The Impersonal God seen through the mists of sense is personal.
757. The sign of life is strength and growth.
758. If I ask you to plunge into the Ganga or to jump from the roof of a house, meaning it all for your good, could you do even that without any hesitations Just think of it even now; otherwise don’t rush forward on the spur of the moment to accept me as your Guru.
759. You must also remember that the world has God to govern it, and He has not left it to our charity. The Lord God is its Governor and Maintainer, and in spite of these wine fanatics and cigar fanatics, and all sorts of marriage fanatics, it would go on. If all these persons were to die, it would go on none the worse.
760. I am a Hindu, I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.
761. There is no God separate from you, no God higher than you, the real “you.” All the gods are little beings to you, all the ideas of God and Father in heaven are but your own reflection. God Himself is your image. “God created man after His own image.” That is wrong. Man creates God after his own image. That is right. Throughout the universe we are creating gods after our own image. We create the god and fall down at his feet and worship him; and when this dream comes, we love it !
762. Some people are so afraid of losing their individuality. Wouldn’t it be better for the pig to lose his pig-individuality if he can become God? Yes. But the poor pig does not think so at the time. Which state is my individuality? When I was a baby sprawling on the floor trying to swallow my thumb? Was that the individuality I should be sorry to lose? Fifty years hence I shall look upon this present state and laugh, just as I now look upon the baby state. Which of these individualities shall I keep?
763. Man is guided by the stomach. He walks and the stomach goes first and the head afterwards. Have you not seen that? It will take ages for the head to go first.
764. There will never be a perfectly good or bad world, because the very idea is a contradiction in terms.
765. As body, mind, or soul, you are a dream; you really are Being, Consciousness, Bliss (satchidananda). You are the God of this universe.
766. Man cannot always think of matter, however pleasurable it may be.
767. Meditation is the means of unification of the subject and object. Meditate.
768. I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them!
769. It is always for greater joy that you give up the lesser. This is practical religion-the attainment of freedom, renunciation. Renounce the lower so that you may get the higher. Renounce! Renounce! Sacrifice! Give up! Not for zero. Not for nothing. But to get the higher.
770. What is the use of talking of one’s mistakes to the world? They cannot thereby be undone. For what one has done one must suffer; one must try and do better. The world sympathizes only with the strong and the powerful.
771. The way to God is the opposite to that of the world. And to few, very few, are given to have God and mammon at the same time.
772. My name should not be made prominent. It is my ideas that I want to see realized. The disciples of all the prophets have always inextricably mixed up the ideas of the Master with person, and at last killed the ideas for the person. The disciples of Sri Ramakrishna must guard against doing the same thing. Work for the idea, not the person.
773. These tremendous contradictions in our intellect, in our knowledge, yea, in all the facts of our life face us on all sides.
774. To his enemies the householder must be a hero. Them he must resist. That is the duty of the householder. He must not sit down in a corner and weep, and talk nonsense about non-resistance. If he does not show himself a hero to his enemies he has not done his duty.
775. Religion, in India, means realisation and nothing short of that.
776. In this world we find that all happiness is followed by misery as its shadow. Life has its shadow, death. They must go together, because they are not contradictory, not two separate existences, but different manifestations of the same unit, life and death, sorrow and happiness, good and evil.
777. We never want Him. We say, “Lord, give me a fine house.” We want the house, not Him. “Give me health! Save me from this difficulty!” When a man wants nothing but Him, [he gets Him].
778. Patanjali, declares that the true secret of evolution is the manifestation of the perfection which is already in every being; that this perfection has been barred and the infinite tide behind is struggling to express itself. These struggles and competitions are but the results of our ignorance, because we do not know the proper way to unlock the gate and let the water in. This infinite tide behind must express itself; it is the cause of all manifestation.
779. The wind of divine grace is always blowing. You just need to spread your sail. Whenever you do anything, do it with your whole heart concentrated on it. Think day and night, I am of the essence of that Supreme Being-Consciousness-Bliss. What fear and anxiety have I?
780. My faith is in the younger generation, the modern generation. Out of them will come my workers. They will work out the whole problem like lions.
781. What the world wants today is twenty men and women who can dare to stand in the street yonder and say that they possess nothing but God. Who will go? Why should one fear? If this is true, what else could matter? If it is not true, what do our lives matter?
782. Change is always in regard to something which does not change, or which changes relatively less.
783. Say – i am the Atman in which my lower ego has become merged for ever. Be perfect in this idea; and then as long as the body endures, speak unto others this message of fearlessness: “Thou art That”, “Arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached!”
784. Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.
785. Stand up, be bold, and take the blame on your own shoulders. Do not go about throwing mud at others; for all the faults you suffer from, you are the sole and only cause.
786. A monk is not forbidden to marry, but if he takes a wife she becomes a monk with the same powers and privileges and occupies the same social position as her husband.
787. Everything must be sacrificed, if necessary, for that one sentiment: universality.
788. Whenever there is a conflict between the pure heart and the intellect, always side with the pure heart.
789. The sea calm is the Absolute; the same sea in waves is Divine Mother.
790. Say to your own minds, “I am He, I am He”. Let it ring day and night in your minds like a song, and at the point of death declare : “I am He”. That is truth; the infinite strength of the world is yours.
791. Those who have succeeded in attaching or detaching their minds at will have succeeded in Pratyahara, which means gathering towards, checking the outgoing powers of the mind, freeing it from the thralldom of the senses. When we can do this, we shall really possess character; then alone we shall have taken a long step towards freedom. Before that, we are mere machines.
792. Immediately you will be perfect, you will become God.
793. Even our smallest attempts are not in vain. We know that nothing is lost.
794. This is the work of Nâma-Rupa – name and form. Everything that has form, everything that calls up an idea in your mind, is within Maya; for everything that is bound by the laws of time, space, and causation is within Maya.
795. No two persons have the same mind or the same body.
796. God is self-evident, impersonal, omniscient, the Knower and the Master of nature, the Lord of all. He is behind all worship and it is being done according to Him, whether we know it or not.
797. We want the education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one’s own feet.
798. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. God is within us. He is the Soul of our souls. See Him in your own soul. That is practical religion. That is freedom.
799. Above all, India is the land of religion.
800. The principles of the Vedanta not only should be preached everywhere in India, but also outside. Our thought must enter into the make-up of the minds of every nation, not through writings, but through persons.
801. Business is business, that is, you must do everything promptly; delay and shuffling won’t do.
802. One ounce of practice is worth a thousand pounds of theory.
803. Meditative state is the highest state of existence. So long as there is desire, no real happiness can come. It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness. The animal has its happiness in the senses, the man in his intellect, and the god in spiritual contemplation. It is only to the soul that has attained to this contemplative state that the world really becomes beautiful. To him who desires nothing, and does not mix himself up with them, the manifold changes of nature are one panorama of beauty and sublimity.
804. Two attempts have been made in the world to found social life: the one was upon religion, and the other was upon social necessity. The one was founded upon spirituality, the other upon materialism; the one upon transcendentalism, the other upon realism.
805. Superstition is great enemy of man but bigotry is worse.
806. You are the makers of your own fortunes. You make yourselves suffer, you make good and evil, and it is you who put your hands before your eyes and say it is dark. Take your hands away and see the light.
807. We must have life building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas.
808. Ay! says the Vedanta, it is not the fault of God that this partiality exists, that this competition exists. Who makes it? We ourselves. There is a cloud shedding its rain on all fields alike. But it is only the field that is well cultivated, which gets the advantage of the shower; another field, which has not been tilled or taken care of cannot get that advantage. It is not the fault of the cloud.
809. Infinite strength is religion and God.
810. To realize the spirit as spirit is practical religion. Everything else is good so far as it leads to this one grand idea. That realization is to be attained by renunciation, by meditation-renunciation of all the senses, cutting the knots, the chains that bind us down to matter.
811. Then from the world all spirituality will be extinct, all moral perfection will be extinct, all sweet-souled sympathy for religion will be extinct, all ideality will be extinct; and in its place will reign the duality of lust and luxury as the male and female deities, with money as its priest, fraud, force, and competition its ceremonies, and the human soul its sacrifice. Such a thing can never be.
812. Everything that you do under compulsion goes to build up attachment.
813. The kingdom of heaven is within us. The Jewish idea was a kingdom of heaven upon this earth. That was not the idea of Jesus.
Conclusion
In a world often clouded by doubt and distraction, Swami Vivekananda quotes serve as beacons of hope and determination.
They remind us to rise above limitations, to serve humanity with compassion, and to believe in our own divine potential.
As you reflect on these powerful words, may they continue to fuel your journey toward truth, strength, and self-awareness.
Let the teachings of Swami Vivekananda illuminate your path and empower you to live with courage and conviction.
