Quotes from Paramahansa Yogananda

The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul's power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.

The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.

Seeds of past karma cannot germinate if they are roasted in the fires of divine wisdom.

To work with God's happiness bubbling in the soul is to carry a portable paradise within you wherever you go.

Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.

Retire to the center of your being, which is calmness.

The entire universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play who change roles through reincarnation; mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God.

The happiness of one's own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one's happiness, the happiness of others.

Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.

If you don't invite God to be your summer Guest, He won't come in the winter of your life.

Every morning I offer my body, my mind and any ability that I posses, to be used by Thee, O infinite creator, in whatever way Thou dost choose to express Thyself through me. I know that all work is Thy work, and that no task is too difficult or too menial when offered to Thee in loving service.

Roam in the world as a lion of self-control; see that the frogs of weakness don't kick you around.

Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire.

Moral: Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you.

Why be elated by material profit?" Father replied. "The one who pursues a goal of evenmindedness is neither jubilant with gain nor depressed by loss. He knows that man arrives penniless in this world, and departs without a single rupee.

If you criticize others judgmentally, rather than simply commenting on their behavior impartially, that shows that you have their faults to work on in yourself. By criticizing others, moreover, you increase those faults in yourself. What you condemn in others, you will have to experience, someday, yourself. That is the karmic law. In that way, people are taught compassion." —Paramhansa Yogananda

He fitted the Vedic definition of a man of God: "Softer than the flower, where kindness is concerned; stronger than the thunder, where principles are at stake.

The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.

Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love.

Man's conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that existence depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state.

You go often into the silence, but have you developed anubhava?" He was reminding me to love God more than meditation. "Do not mistake the technique for the Goal.

The greatest sin is to call yourself a sinner. You are a child of God. Though gold be covered with mud for centuries, it remains gold. So the pure 'gold' of the soul can be covered over with the mud of delusion for aeons, but in its true nature it remains forever undefiled." —Paramhansa Yogananda

The reflection, the verisimilitude, of life that shines in the fleshly cells from the soul source is the only cause of man's attachment to his body; obviously he would not pay solicitous homage to a clod of clay. A human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own.

Opportunities in life come by creation, not by chance. You yourself, either now or in the past (including the past of former lives), have created all opportunities that arise in your path. Since you have earned them, use them to the best advantage.