48 Swami Vivekananda Quotes on Spirituality

Swami Vivekananda quotes on spirituality

1. Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within, by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.

3. You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.

20. Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.

21. The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

22. The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.

23. There is nothing beyond God, and the sense enjoyments are simply something through which we are passing now in the hope of getting better things.

26. That man has reached immortality who is disturbed by nothing material.

27. You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

32. The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!

39. The Vedanta teaches that Nirvana can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death to reach it. Nirvana is the realization of the Self; and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of personality.

48. All is the Self or Brahman. The saint, the sinner, the lamb, the tiger, even the murderer, as far as they have any reality, can be nothing else, because there is nothing else.

50. All that is real in me is God; all that is real in God is I. The gulf between God and me is thus bridged. Thus by knowing God, we find that the kingdom of heaven is within us.

52. All who have actually attained any real religious experience never wrangle over the form in which the different religions are expressed. They know that the soul of all religions is the same and so they have no quarrel with anybody just because he or she does not speak in the same tongue.

54. Anything that is secret and mysterious in these systems of yoga should be at once rejected. The best guide in life is strength. In religion, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you, have nothing to do with it.

57. As body, mind, or soul, you are a dream; you really are Being, Consciousness, Bliss (satchidananda). You are the God of this universe.

58. As long as we believe ourselves to be even the least different from God, fear remains with us; but when we know ourselves to be the One, fear goes; of what can we be afraid?

60. As soon as you know the voice and understand what it is, the whole scene changes. The same world which was the ghastly battlefield of maya is now changed into something good and beautiful.

68. Delusion will vanish as the light becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the sun alone shines.

76. Every action that helps us manifest our divine nature more and more is good; every action that retards it is evil.

82. First get rid of the delusion 'I am the body,' then only will we want real knowledge.

88. God is very merciful to those whom He sees struggling heart and soul for spiritual realization. But remain idle, without any struggle, and you will see that His grace will never come.

98. If there is one word that you find coming out like a bomb from the Upanishads, bursting like a bombshell upon masses of ignorance, it is the word 'fearlessness.'

102. Is there any sex-distinction in the Atman (Self)? Out with the differentiation between man and woman-all is Atman! Give up the identification with the body, and stand up!

103. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.

111. Let us worship the spirit in spirit, standing on spirit. Let the foundation be spirit, the middle spirit, the culmination spirit.

113. Nature, body, mind go to death, not we. We neither go nor come. The man Vivekananda is in nature, is born and dies; but the Self we see as Vivekananda is never born and never dies. It is the eternal and unchangeable Reality.

117. Our first duty is not to hate ourselves, because to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God. Those who have no faith in themselves can never have faith in God.

120. Perfection is always infinite. We are the Infinite already.You and I, and all beings, are trying to manifest that infinity.

122. Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are ...but unless you realize the Truth, there is no freedom.

123. Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are :[but] unless you realize the Self (atman), there is no freedom.

127. So long as there is desire or want, it is a sure sign that there is imperfection. A perfect, free being cannot have any desire.

136. The essence of Vedanta is that there is but one Being and that every soul is that Being in full, not a part of that Being.

141. The important thing is: how much less you think of the body, of yourself as matter-as dead, dull, insentient matter; how much more you think of yourself as shining immortal being.

145. The more you think of yourself as shining immortal spirit, the more eager you will be to be absolutely free of matter, body, and senses. This is the intense desire to be free.

147. The power is with the silent ones, who only live and love and then withdraw their personality. They never say 'me' and 'mine'; they are only blessed in being instruments.

152. The Soul is not composed of any materials. It is unity indivisible. Therefore it must be indestructible.

165. This is the great lesson that we are here to learn through myriads of births and heavens and hells-that there is nothing to be asked for, desired for, beyond one's spiritual Self (atman).

171. Understanding human nature is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing it can we know God. It is also a fact that the knowledge of God is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing God can we understand human nature.

174. We believe that every being is divine, is God. Every soul is a sun covered over with clouds of ignorance; the difference between soul and soul is owing to the difference in density of these layers of clouds.

177. We must approach religion with reverence and with love, and our heart will stand up and say, this is truth, and this is untruth.

182. What do you gain in heaven? You become gods, drink nectar, and get rheumatism. There is less misery there than on earth, but also less truth.

185. When we have become free, we need not go mad and throw up society and rush off to die in the forest or the cave; we shall remain where we were but we shall understand the whole thing. The same phenomena will remain but with a new meaning.

189. Why are people so afraid? The answer is that they have made themselves helpless and dependent on others. We are so lazy, we do not want to do anything ourselves. We want a Personal God, a Savior or a Prophet to do everything for us.

192. Work and worship are necessary to take away the veil, to lift off the bondage and illusion.

194. Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry. The soul has no sex, no country, no place, no time.

198. I will quote to you brethren a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest childhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: 'As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.'

199. The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: 'Whosoever comes to me, though whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.'

209. A man who has attained certain powers through medicines, or through words, or through mortification, still has desires, but that man who has attained to Samadhi through concentration is alone free from all desires.