Quotes by Swami Vivekananda
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Onward, my brave boys -- money or no money -- men or no men! Have you love? Have you God? Onward and forward to the breach, you are irresistible.

Do one thing at a Time, and while doing it put your whole Soul into it to the exclusion of all else.

The mind is but the subtle part of the body. You must retain great strength in your mind and words.

The guide, the guru, the leader, the teacher, has passed away; the boy, the student, the servant, is left behind.

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.

Some would call you a saint, some a chandala; some a lunatic, others a demon. Go on then straight to thy work without heeding either -- thus saith one of our great Sannyasins, an old emperor of India, King Bhartrihari, who joined the order in old times.

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.

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.

Know it for certain that without steady devotion for the Guru and unflinching patience and perseverance, nothing is to be achieved. You must have strict morality.

We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.

The powers of the mind should be concentrated and the mind turned back upon itself; as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will the concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets.

The powers of the mind are like the rays of the sun when they are concentrated they illumine.

Forget not that thy marriage, thy wealth, thy life are not for sense-pleasure, are not for thy individual personal happiness.

There will never be a perfectly good or bad world, because the very idea is a contradiction in terms.

You of the West are practical in business, practical in great inventions, but we of the East are practical in religion. You make commerce your business; we make religion our business.

All motion, either in the body or anywhere else, is the work of this Prana.

Prana is the driving power of the world, and can be seen in every manifestation of life.

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.

Have faith in yourselves, be proud of your ancestors, instead of being ashamed of them.

Stand as a rock; you are indestructible. You are the Self, the God of the universe.

All these disciplines are for the purification of the heart. And as soon as it is pure, all truths flash upon it in a minute; all truth in the universe will manifest in your heart, if you are sufficiently pure.

Meditation, you know, comes by a process imagination. You go through all these processes purification of the elements -- making the one melt the other, that into the next higher, that into mind, that into spirit, and then you are spirit.

Eka-Nishtha or devotion to one ideal is absolutely necessary for the beginner in the practice of religious devotion.

We may worship a picture as God, but not God as the picture. God in the picture is right, but the picture as God is wrong. God in the image is perfectly right. There is no danger there. This is the real worship of God. But the image-God is a mere Pratika.

Impurity is a mere superimposition under which your real nature has become hidden. But the real you is already perfect, already strong.

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.

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.

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.

Feel, my children, feel; feel for the poor, the ignorant, the downtrodden; feel till the heart stops and the brain reels and you think you will go mad; then pour the soul out at the feet of the Lord, and then will come power, help and indomitable energy.

Service to man is service to god.

God is present in every Jiva; there is no other God besides that. Who serves Jiva serves God indeed.

The happiest is the man who is not at all selfish.

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.

Materialism prevails in Europe today. You may pray for the salvation of the modern sceptics, but they do not yield, they want reason.

The progress of the world through all its evils making it fit for the ideals, slowly but surely.

The sign of life is strength and growth.

Motion is the sign of life.

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.

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

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.

Space-time-causation, or name-and-form, is what is called Maya.

Everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation.

Even the lowest of the Hindus, the Pariah, has less of the brute in him than a Briton in a similar social status. This is the result of an old and excellent religious civilization. This evolution to a higher spiritual state is possible only through discipline and education.

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.

Happiness presents itself to man, wearing the crown of sorrow on its head. He who welcomes it must also welcome sorrow.

The world is a demon. It is a kingdom of which the puny ego is king. Put it away and stand firm.

Consciously or unconsciously, we are all striving for perfection. Every being must attain to it.

In spirituality the Americans are very inferior to us. But their society is very superior to ours.

Do not blame any supernatural being, neither be hopeless and despondent, nor think we are in a place from which we can never escape unless someone comes and lends us a helping hand.

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.

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.

We are for ever trying to make our weakness look like strength, our sentiment like love, our cowardice like courage, and so on.

God is not to be reached by the weak. Never be weak. You have infinite strength within you. How else will you conquer anything? How else will you come to God?

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.

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.

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.

In the English character, the give and take policy, the business principle of the trader, is principally inherent.

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.

Take off the veil of hypnotism which you have cast upon the world, send not out thoughts and words of weakness unto humanity.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible -- and this is Art.

My countrymen should have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and minds like thunderbolt.

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!

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.

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.

The Buddhist tenet, Non-killing is supreme virtue, is very good, but in trying to enforce it upon all by legislation without paying any heed to the capacities of the people at large, Buddhism has brought ruin upon India.

So long as we perceive this world in motion, we have to conceive will behind it.

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.

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.

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.

The Vedanta teaches men to have faith in themselves first.

Anything that brings spiritual, mental, or physical weakness, touch it not with the toes of your feet.

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.

Not believing in the glory of our own soul is what the Vedanta calls atheism.

Comfort is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being comfortable.

The first sign of your becoming religious is that you are becoming cheerful.

The one theme of the Vedanta philosophy is the search after unity. The Hindu mind does not care for the particular; it is always after the general, nay, the universal. what is it that by knowing which everything else is to be known. That is the one search.

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.

Perfection does not come from belief or faith. Talk does not count for anything. Parrots can do that. Perfection comes through the disinterested performance of action.

We are ever free if we would only believe it, only have faith enough. You are the soul, free and eternal, ever free, ever blessed. Have faith enough and you will be free in a minute.

We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise.

To succeed, you must have tremendous perseverance, tremendous will.

You see, no one can teach anybody. The teacher spoils everything by thinking that he is teaching. Thus Vedanta says that within man is all knowledge-even in a boy it is so-and it requires only an awakening, and that much is the work of a teacher.

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.

There is no help for you, outside yourself; You are the creator of the universe.

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.

The correct meaning of the statement The Vedas are beginningless and eternal is that the law or truth revealed by them is permanent and changeless.

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.

On this basic -- being right and doing right the whole world can unite.

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.

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.