Quotes from Swami Vivekananda

Motion is the sign of life.

In India, religious life forms the centre, the keynote of the whole music of national life.

Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value, if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery.

This life is a tremendous assertion of freedom

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

Let a man go down as low as possible; there must come a time when out of sheer desperation he will take an upward curve and will learn to have faith in himself.

The way to God is the opposite to that of the world. And to few, very few, are given to have God and mammon at the same time.

What is salvation? To live with God. Where? Anywhere. Here this moment. One moment in infinite time is quite as good as any other moment.

Live for an ideal, and that one ideal alone. Let it be so great, so strong, that there may be nothing else left in the mind; no place for anything else, no time for anything else.

Every time you meditate you will keep your growth.

We have either to progress or to degenerate. Our ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life and march beyond even their great achievements.

Books are only made so that they may point the way to a higher life; but no good results unless the path is trodden with unflinching steps!

This is the great fact: strength is life.

Thirst after body is the great bane of human life.

We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.

Remember the only sign of life is motion and growth.

Here in this blessed land, the foundation, the backbone, the life-centre is religion and religion alone.

These tremendous contradictions in our intellect, in our knowledge, yea, in all the facts of our life face us on all sides.

Forget not that thy marriage, thy wealth, thy life are not for sense-pleasure, are not for thy individual personal happiness.

Jiva (individual soul) is the conscious ruler of this body, in whom the five life principles come into unity, and yet that very Jiva is the Atman, because all is Atman.

Life in this world is an attempt to see God.

Christ's public life extended only over eighteen months, and for this he had silently been preparing himself for thirty - two years.

Is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day in human life?

Those who die, merely suffering the woes of life like cats and dogs, are they men?