Swami Vivekananda > Quotes

“Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life; dream of it; think of it; live on that idea. Let the brain, the body, 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, and this is the way great spiritual giants are produced.”
― Swami Vivekananda, Vedanta Philosophy: Lectures by the Swami Vivekananda on Raja Yoga Also Pantanjali's Yoga Aphorisms, with Commentaries, and Glossary of Sa

“In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart. ”
― Swami Vivekananda

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you,
none can make you spiritual.
There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“In a day, when you don't come across any problems - you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path”
― Swami Vivekananda

“When I Asked God for Strength
He Gave Me Difficult Situations to Face

When I Asked God for Brain & Brown
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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Dare to be free, dare to go as far as your thought leads, and dare to carry that out in your life. ”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Be not Afraid of anything. You will do Marvelous work. it is Fearlessness that brings Heaven even in a moment.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda

“The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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 any thing and everything, without even the guidance of any one. Stand up and express the divinity within you.”
― Swami Vivekananda, Lectures from Colombo to Almora

“Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Strength is Life, Weakness is Death.
Expansion is Life, Contraction is Death.
Love is Life, Hatred is Death.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“They alone live, who live for others.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate.
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?....... We make our own destiny.
”
― Swami Vivekananda

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far. ”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Anything that makes weak - physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.”
― Swami Vivekananda

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

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!”
― Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about that you think.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“whatever you think that you will be.
if you think yourself weak,weak you will be;
if you think yourself strong,you will be”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Learn Everything that is Good from Others, but bring it in, and in your own way absorb it; do not become others.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in the future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or temples, or churches or books, are only the supports, the help of his spiritual childhood.”
― Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works

“The greatest sin is to think yourself weak”
― Swami Vivekananda, Pearls of Wisdom

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“arise,awake,stop not until your goal is achieved.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Blessed are they whose bodies get destroyed in the service of others.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“The brain and muscles must develop simultaneously. Iron nerves with an intelligent brain — and the whole world is at your feet.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Be strong! … You talk of ghosts and devils. We are the living devils. The sign of life is strength and growth. The sign of death is weakness. Whatever is weak, avoid! It is death. If it is strength, go down into hell and get hold of it! There is salvation only for the brave. "None but the brave deserves the fair." None but the bravest deserves salvation.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“Don't look back—forward, infinite energy, infinite enthusiasm, infinite daring, and infinite patience—then alone can great deeds be accomplished.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“beleive in yourself and the world will be at your feet”
― Swami Vivekananda

“If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. [...] man is not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“The cheerful mind perseveres and the strong mind hews its way through a thousand difficulties.”
― Swami Vivekananda

“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.”
― Swami Vivekananda