Swami Vivekananda Quotes

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“It was India's Karma, her fate, to be conquered, and in her turn, to conquer her conqueror. She has already done so with her Mohammedan victors: Educated Mohammedans are Sufis, scarcely to be distinguished from Hindus. Hindu thought has permeated their civilisation; they assumed the position of learners. And England will be conquered in her turn. Today she has the sword, but it is worse than useless in the world of ideas. You know what Schopenhauer said of Indian thought. He foretold that its influence would be as momentous in Europe, when it became well known, as the revival of Greek and Latin; culture after the Dark Ages.”

“Every step I take in light is mine forever.”

“The more you think of yourself as shining immortal spirit, the more eager you will be to be absolutely free of matter, body, and senses. This is the intense desire to be free.”

“Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not for struggles. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mistakes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is only a cow—never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings; hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.”

“The less passion there is, the better we work. The calmer we are, the better for us and the more the amount of work we can do. When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work.”

“Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.”

“To believe blindly is to degenerate the human soul. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.”

“Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.”

“The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you free.”

“Come out into the universe of Light. Everything in the universe is yours, stretch out your arms and embrace it with love. If you every felt you wanted to do that, you have felt God.”

“Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.”

“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.””

“Do not look back upon what has been done. Go ahead!”

“One of the chief distinctions between the Vedic and the Christian religion is that the Christian religion teaches that each human soul had its beginning at its birth into this world, whereas the Vedic religion asserts that the spirit of man is an emanation of the Eternal Being and has no more a beginning than God Himself.”

“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.”

“Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.”

“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.”

“The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.”

“Despondency is not religion, whatever else it may be.”

“Religion has no business to formulate social laws and insist on the difference between beings, because its aim and end is to obliterate all such fictions and monstrosities.”

“Superstition is our great enemy, but bigotry is worse.”

“If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us.”

“I, for one, thoroughly believe that no power in the universe can withhold from anyone anything he really deserves.”

“In one word, this ideal is that you are divine.”

“Death is better than a vegetating ignorant life; it is better to die on the battle-field than to live a life of defeat.”

“Strength is the sign of vigor, the sign of life, the sign of hope, the sign of health, and the sign of everything that is good. As long as the body lives, there must be strength in the body, strength in the mind, strength in the hand.”

“The will is not free—it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect—but there is something behind the will which is free.”

“What the world wants is character. The world is in need of those whose life is one burning love, selfless. That love will make every word tell like a thunderbolt.”

“Truth does not pay homage to any society, ancient or modern. Society has to pay homage to Truth or die.”

“We have to go back to philosophy to treat things as they are. 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?”

“We must overcome difficulty by constant practice. We must learn that nothing can happen to us unless we make ourselves susceptible to it.”

“A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.”

“Unselfishness is God.”

“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.”

“And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands and they are gone forever. What is the history of your America, your Australia and New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive.”

“The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek.... It is a man-making religion that we want.... Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong.... For the next fifty years. … let all other gods disappear 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.... The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. … He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”

“After so much austerity I have known that the highest truth is this: He is present in every being! These are all in manifold forms of him. There is no other God to seek for! He alone is worshipping God, who serves all beings!”

“To succeed, you must have tremendous perseverance, tremendous will. "I will drink the ocean", says the persevering soul; "at my will mountains will crumble up." Have that sort of energy, that sort of will; work hard, and you will reach the goal.”

“No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English, and, on this platform, are present English friends who can bear witness to the fact, but the more I lived among them, saw how the machine is working, the English national life, mixed with them, found where the heart-beat of the nation was, the more I loved them. There is none among you here present, my brothers, who loves the English people more than I do. You have to see what is going on there, and you have to mix with them. As the philosophy, our national philosophy of the Vedanta, has summarised all misfortune, all misery from that one cause, ignorance, herein also we must understand that the difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to that ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.”