Paramahansa Yogananda Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.

Paramahansa Yogananda
The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Remain calm, serene, always in command of yourself. You will then find out how easy it is to get along.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Weaken a bad habit by avoiding everything that occasioned it or stimulated it, without concentrating upon it in your zeal to avoid it. Then divert your mind to some good habit and steadily cultivate it until it becomes a dependable part of you.

Paramahansa Yogananda
This world is not the same to all people. Each one lives in his little domain....Peace and harmony may reign in one person's world; where strife and restlessness in anothers. But whatever the circumstances of one's environment, it consists of both an inner and an outer world. The outside world is the one in which your life engages in action and interaction. The world inside of you determines your happiness or unhappiness.

Paramahansa Yogananda
God-realization is attained only by great effort on the part of the yogi and by divine grace.

Paramahansa Yogananda
The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Realize the tremendous spiritual power and beauty of the life of Christ, and try to live as he lived. Christ had no nationality. He loved all races as the children of God. Try to feel that brotherhood with all nationalities. Real brotherhood can never come unless we feel it in our hearts. Such feeling can be attained only through the actual contact of God in our hearts.

Paramahansa Yogananda
I relax and cast aside all mental burdens, allowing God to express through me His perfect love, peace, and wisdom.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Truths are more than imagination; they are real. Yet their origin is a thought in the mind of God.

Paramahansa Yogananda
We should bathe our spirits in the deep, pure feeling that stirs within us when we gaze on the glories of His creation. This is the way to know God as beauty.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Those persons who have perceptive eyes enjoy beauty everywhere.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Be honest with yourself. The world is not honest with you. The world loves hypocrisy. When you are honest with yourself you find the road to inner peace.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Most of the world is like a mental hospital. Some persons are sick with jealousy, others with anger, hatred, passion. They are victims of their habits and emotions. But you can make your home a place of peace.

Paramahansa Yogananda
We are what we think we are. The habitual inclination of our thoughts determines our talents and abilities, and our personality. So whatever you want to be, start to develop that pattern now.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Ever-new Joy is God. He is inexhaustible; as you continue your meditations during the years, He will beguile you with an infinite ingenuity. Devotees like yourself who have found the way to God never dream of exchanging Him for any other happiness; He is seductive beyond thought of competition.

Paramahansa Yogananda
The time will come when mankind will begin to get away from the consciousness of needing so many material things. More security and peace will be found in the simple life.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.

Paramahansa Yogananda
God-realization is the most difficult state to reach. Let no one fool himself, nor think that someone else can "give" it to him. Whenever I fell into a state of mental stagnation, my Master could do nothing for me. But I never gave up trying to keep in tune with him by cheerfully performing whatever he asked me to do. "I have come to him for God-realization," I reasoned, "and I must listen to his advice."

Paramahansa Yogananda
Why forgive one who wrongs you? Because if you angrily strike back you misrepresent your own divine soul nature-you are no better than your offender. But if you manifest spiritual strength you are blessed, and the power of your righteous behavior will also help the other person to overcome his misunderstanding.

Paramahansa Yogananda
I don't want people to think that they can attain realization simply by listening to others or by reading books. They must practice what they read and hear.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Wise guidance never violates people's Free Will. A superior who demands obedience of his subordinates should show respect for their capacity to understand, and also for their Innate Right to their own Free Will.

Paramahansa Yogananda
There is in India a story of a dying youth who, hearing the sobs of grief around him, cried: Insult me not with your cries of sympathy. When I soar to the land of eternal light and love; it is I who should feel for you. For me, disease, shattering of bones, sorrow, excruciating heartaches no more. I dream joy, I glide in joy, I breathe in joy evermore.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Just as oil is present in every part of the olive, so love permeates every part of creation.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Thought is the primary energy and vibration that emanated from God and is thus the creator of life, electrons, atoms, and all forms of energy.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Those in the West who have adopted Christ as their own should remember that he was an Oriental. Love and sympathy for Jesus should be expanded into love and sympathy for all Orientals, and for all the world.

Paramahansa Yogananda
The greatest romance is with the Infinite.
You have no idea how beautiful life can be.
When you suddenly find God everywhere,
when He comes and talks to you and guides you,
the romance of divine love has begun.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Christ has been much misinterpreted by the world. Even the most elementary principles of his teachings have been desecrated, and their esoteric depths have been forgotten. They have been crucified at the hands of dogma, prejudice, and cramped understanding. Genocidal wars have been fought, people have been burned as witches and heretics, on the presumed authority of man-made doctrines of Christianity. How to salvage the immortal teachings from the hands of ignorance? We must know Jesus as an Oriental Christ, a supreme yogi who manifested full mastery of the universal science of God-union, and thus could speak and act as a savior with the voice and authority of God.

Paramahansa Yogananda
Not an unconscious state
Or mental chloroform without wilful return,
Samadhi but extends my realm of consciousness
Beyond the limits of my mortal frame
To the boundaries of eternity,
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in Me.

Paramahansa Yogananda
The things you need in life are those that will help you to fulfill your dominant purpose. Things you may want but not need may lead you aside from that purpose. It is only by making everything serve your main objective that success is attained.

Paramahansa Yogananda