Quotes from Vivekananda

To turn the mind inside, stop it from going outside, and then to concentrate all its powers, and throw them upon the mind itself, in order that it may know its own nature, so that it will analyse itself, as it were, is indeed very hard work. Yet that is the only way to anything like a scientific approach towards the subject. Now

To work we have the right, but not to the fruits thereof:

We see then, in the study of Raja Yoga no faith or belief is necessary. Believe nothing until you find it out for yourself—that is what it teaches us. For, truth requires no prop to make it stand.

To the man who has begun to hate himself the gate to degeneration has already opened; and the same is true of a nation.

A Yogi must avoid the two extremes of luxury and austerity. He must not fast, nor torture his flesh. He who does so, says the Gita, cannot be a Yogi: He who fasts, he who keeps awake, he who sleeps much, he who works too much, he who does no work, none of these can be a Yogi (Gita, VI, 16).

through the mercy of the Lord, reaches a plane where pedantic and powerless reason is left far behind, and the mere intellectual groping through the dark gives place to the daylight of direct perception. He no more reasons and believes, he almost perceives. He no more argues, he senses. And is not this seeing God, and feeling God, and enjoying God higher than everything else?

our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames--every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together are called Karma--work, action.

A householder who does not struggle to get wealth is immoral. If

The householder is the centre of life and society. It is a worship for him to acquire and spend wealth nobly

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

for the householder who struggles to become rich by good means and for good purposes is doing practically the same thing for the attainment of salvation as the anchorite does in his cell when he is praying;

The seed is put in the ground, and earth and air and water are placed around it. Does the seed become the earth; or the air, or the water? No. It becomes a plant, it develops after the law of its own growth, assimilates the air, the earth, and the water, converts them into plant substance, and grows into a plant.

A Yogi must avoid the two extremes of luxury and austerity. He must not fast, or torture his flesh. For, says the Gita, "He who fasts and he who eats too much, he who keeps awake and he who sleeps much, he who works too much and he who does no work, none of these can be Yogis.

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 a man "learns" is really what he "discovers", by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

All knowledge, therefore, secular or spiritual, is in the human mind. In many cases it is not discovered, but remains covered, and when the covering is being slowly taken off, we say, "We are learning," and the advance of knowledge is made by the advance of this process of uncovering. The man from whom this veil is being lifted is the more knowing man, the man upon whom it lies thick is ignorant

day when you do not come across any problems you can be sure that you are travelling on the wrong path

If the mind is intensely eager everything can be accomplished Mountains can be crumbled into atoms

In modern times this millennial aspiration takes the form of equality--of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This is also fanaticism. True equality has never been and never can be on earth.

Those who are constantly attached to Me and worship Me with love — I give that direction to their will by which they come to Me.

We plainly see, therefore, that Bhakti is a series or succession of mental efforts at religious realisation beginning with ordinary worship and ending in a supreme intensity of love for Ishvara.

The human body, again, is the greatest of its kind in the universe, and a human being the greatest being. Man is higher than all the animals and all the angels, so say the Scriptures. None is greater than man, for even the Devas or gods will have to come down again and attain salvation through a human body. For, man alone attains to perfection, and not even the Devas.