Swami Vivekananda Quotes

1,114 Sourced Quotes

"Learn good knowledge with all devotion from the lowest caste. Learn the way to freedom, even if it comes from a Pariah, by serving him. If a woman is a jewel, take her in marriage even if she comes from a low family of the lowest caste." Such is the law laid down by our great and peerless legislator, the divine Manu.

Swami Vivekananda
Renunciation, and renunciation alone, is the real secret, the Mulamantra, of all Realisation.

Swami Vivekananda
What do we call the river? Every moment the water is changing, the shore is changing, every moment the environment is changing, what is the river then? It is the name of this series of changes.

Swami Vivekananda
The Absolute God of the universe, the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe, is impersonal principle.

Swami Vivekananda
Change is always subjective. All through evolution you find that the conquest of nature comes by change in the subject. Apply this to religion and morality, and you will find that the conquest of evil comes by the change in the subjective alone. That is how the Advaitic system gets its whole force, on the subjective side of man.

Swami Vivekananda
Do not blame any supernatural being, neither be hopeless and despondent, nor think we are in a place from which we can never escape unless someone comes and lends us a helping hand.

Swami Vivekananda
Until higher institutions have been evolved, any attempt to break the old ones will be disastrous.

Swami Vivekananda
A certain motion becomes understood when it is referred to a force; certain sensations, to matter; certain changes outside, to law; certain changes in thought, to mind; certain order singly, to causation - and joined to time, to law.

Swami Vivekananda
The same fire that cooks a meal for us may burn a child, and it is no fault of the fire if it does so; the difference lies in the way in which it is used.

Swami Vivekananda
Stand in that reverent attitude to the whole universe, and then will come perfect non attachment.

Swami Vivekananda
Have faith in Guru, in his teachings, and in the surety that you can get free. Think day and night that this universe is zero, only God is. Have intense desire to get free.

Swami Vivekananda
In Buddha we had the great, universal heart and infinite patience, making religion practical and bringing it to everyone's door.

Swami Vivekananda
Bold has been my message to the people of the west, bolder is my message to you, my beloved countryman.

Swami Vivekananda
There is no such thing as "righteous" anger or justifiable killing.

Swami Vivekananda
All growth, progress, well - being, or degradation is but relative.

Swami Vivekananda
One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots.

Swami Vivekananda
We are all born idolaters, and idolatry is good, because it is in the nature of man. Who can get beyond it? Only the perfect man, the God-man. The rest are all idolaters. So long as we see this universe before us, with its forms and shapes, we are all idolaters. This is a gigantic symbol we are worshipping. He who says he is the body is a born idolater.

Swami Vivekananda
No negative, all positive, affirmative. I am, God is, everything is in me. I will manifest health, purity, knowledge, whatever I want.

Swami Vivekananda
Education is not filling the mind with a lot of facts. Perfecting the instrument and getting complete mastery of my own mind [is the ideal of education].

Swami Vivekananda
Ay! says the Vedanta, it is not the fault of God that this partiality exists, that this competition exists. Who makes it? We ourselves. There is a cloud shedding its rain on all fields alike. But it is only the field that is well cultivated, which gets the advantage of the shower; another field, which has not been tilled or taken care of cannot get that advantage. It is not the fault of the cloud.

Swami Vivekananda
Men may have given millions of dollars and fed rats and cats, as some do in India. They say that men can take care of themselves, but the poor animals cannot...

Swami Vivekananda
Only when creation stops can we find the Absolute. The Absolute is in the soul, not in creation. So by stopping creation, we come to know the Absolute.

Swami Vivekananda
Two attempts have been made in the world to found social life: the one was upon religion, and the other was upon social necessity. The one was founded upon spirituality, the other upon materialism; the one upon transcendentalism, the other upon realism.

Swami Vivekananda
This external worship of images has, however, been described in all our Shastras as the lowest of all the low forms of worship. But that does not mean that it is a wrong thing to do.

Swami Vivekananda
The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.

Swami Vivekananda
Despite the many iniquities that have found entrance into the practices of image-worship as it is in vogue now, I do not condemn it. Ay, where would I have been if I had not been blessed with the dust of the holy feet of that orthodox, image-worshipping Brahmin!

Swami Vivekananda
Prana is the driving power of the world, and can be seen in every manifestation of life.

Swami Vivekananda
The one theme of the Vedanta philosophy is the search after unity. The Hindu mind does not care for the particular; it is always after the general, nay, the universal. "what is it that by knowing which everything else is to be known." That is the one search.

Swami Vivekananda
I direct my attention to the individual, to make him strong, to teach him that he himself is divine, and I call upon men to make themselves conscious of this divinity within. That is really the ideal --conscious or unconscious --of every religion.

Swami Vivekananda
I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them!

Swami Vivekananda