Quotes from Swami Vivekananda

The knowing ones must have pity on the ignorant. One who knows is willing to give up his body even for an ant, because he knows that the body is nothing.

This World will always continue to be a mixture of Good and Evil. Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to Love even the wrongdoer.

Do not believe in a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe in a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.

Desire can be eradicated from the roots by firmly imbibing the four attributes of: Jnan, Atmanishtha, Vairagya, Dharma and the full fledged devotion to God.

The mother and the father are the causes of this body; so a man must undergo a thousand troubles in order to do good to them.

When an idea exclusively occupies the mind, it is transformed into an actual physical or mental state.

Why should a Man be Moral? Because this strengthens his will.

By doing well the duty which is nearest to us, the duty which is in our hands, we make ourselves stronger

A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.

The help which tends to make us spiritually strong is the highest help, next to it comes intellectual help and after that comes physical help.

Be Grateful to the Man you help, think of Him as God. Is it not a great privilege to be allowed to worship God by helping our fellow men?

A good practice carried to an extreme and worked in accordance with the letter of the law becomes a positive evil.

The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert.

Of one hundred persons who take up the spiritual life, eighty turn out to be charlatans, fifteen insane, and only five, maybe, get a glimpse of the real truth. Therefore beware.

Have Faith in Man, whether he appears to you to be a very learned one or a most ignorant one.

Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before. We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes.

God Gave Me Nothing I Wanted He Gave Me Everything I Needed.

The goal of mankind is knowledge. That is the one ideal placed before us by Eastern philosophy. Pleasure is not the goal of man, but knowledge. Pleasure and happiness come to an end. It is a mistake to suppose that pleasure is the goal.

Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth.

The mind is in its own nature when it is calm. The moment you can calm it, that [very] moment you will know the truth.

The Heart and core of everything here is good, that whatever may be the surface waves, deep down and underlying everything, there is an infinite basis of Goodness and Love.

The Older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness. This is my new gospel

A tremendous stream is flowing toward the ocean, carrying us all along with it; and though like straws and scraps of paper we may at times float aimlessly about, in the long run we are sure to join the Ocean of Life and Bliss.

We only know the universe from the point of view of beings with five senses. Suppose we obtain another sense, the whole universe must change for us.