Quotes from Swami Vivekananda

As soon as extreme attachment comes, a man loses himself, he is no more master of himself, he is a slave.

Fool indeed is he, who, living on the banks of the Ganga, digs a little well for water. Fool indeed is the man who, coming to a mine of diamonds, begins to search for glass beads.

Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.

Man stands in materialism; you and I are materialists. Our talking about God and Spirit is good; but it is simply the vogue in our society to talk thus: we have learnt it parrot-like and repeat it.

The Vedanta teaches men to have faith in themselves first.

Man has wanted to look beyond, wanted to expand himself; and all that we call progress, evolution, has been always measured by that one search, the search for human destiny, the search for God.

Man always is perfect, or he never could become so; but he had to realise it.

The day, man will find that he never really dies; that his Soul persists beyond death; he will have no more fear of death.

There is no end to the power a man can obtain.

Man is the product of two forces, action and reaction, which make him think.

If I am a Pariah, I will be all the more glad, for I am the disciple of a man, who - the Brahmin of Brahmins - wanted to cleanse the house of a Pariah. (here "the man" means Ramakrishna)

None of us have yet seen an ideally perfect man, and yet without that ideal we cannot progress.

Man can become like God and acquire control over the whole universe if he multiplies infinitely his centre of self-consciousness.

Each man has a mission in life, which is the result of all his infinite past Karma.

Man is a degeneration of what he was.

Man is guided by the stomach. He walks and the stomach goes first and the head afterwards. Have you not seen that? It will take ages for the head to go first.

The apparent man is only a limitation of that Real Man.

The natural ambition of woman is through marriage to climb up, leaning upon a man; but those days are gone. You shall be great without the help of any man, just as you are.

Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress, and marriage, and in every other thing, so long as he does not injure others.

Two things control man's character; Strength and Pity

Service to man is service to god

Man's free agency is not of the mind, for that is bound. There is no freedom there.

Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language.

The older I grow, the more I see behind the idea of the Hindus that man is the greatest of all beings.