Swami Vivekananda - Nature Quotes

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All these practices and struggles to become religious are only negative work, to take off the bars, and open the doors to that perfection which is our birthright, our nature.

Swami Vivekananda
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.

Swami Vivekananda
Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature, it will assimilate and grow by its own nature.

Swami Vivekananda
All progress and power are already in every man; perfection is man's nature, only it is barred in and prevented from taking its proper course.

Swami Vivekananda
First, meditation should be of a negative nature. Think away everything. Analyse everything that comes in the mind by the sheer action of the will. Next, assert what we really are-existence, knowledge, and bliss-being, knowing, and loving.

Swami Vivekananda
This little separate self must die. Then we shall find that we are in the Real, and that Real is God, and He is our own true nature, and He is always in us and with us. Let us live in Him and stand in Him. It is the only joyful state of existence. Life on the plane of the Spirit is the only life, and let us all try to attain to this realization.

Swami Vivekananda
All perfection is there already in the soul. But this perfection has been covered up by nature; layer after layer of nature is covering this purity of the soul.

Swami Vivekananda
You cannot teach a child any more than you can grow a plant. All you can do is on the negative side - you can only help. It is a manifestation from within; it develops its own nature - you can only take away obstructions.

Swami Vivekananda
In nature alone are forms. That which is not of nature cannot have any forms, fine or gross. It must be formless.

Swami Vivekananda
The only religion that ought to be taught is the religion of fearlessness. Either in this world or in the world of religion, it is true that fear is the sure cause of degradation and sin. It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.

Swami Vivekananda
Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.

Swami Vivekananda
Have faith in man, whether he appears to you to be a very learned one or a most ignorant one. Have faith in man, whether he appears to be an angel or the very devil himself. Have faith in man first, and then having faith in him, believe that if there are defects in him, if he makes mistakes, if he embraces the crudest and the vilest doctrines, believe that it is not from his real nature that they come, but from the want of higher ideals.

Swami Vivekananda
God is self-evident, impersonal, omniscient, the Knower and the Master of nature, the Lord of all. He is behind all worship and it is being done according to Him, whether we know it or not.

Swami Vivekananda
The spirit is the cause of all our thoughts and body-action, and everything, but it is untouched by good or evil, pleasure or pain, heat or cold, and all the dualism of nature, although it lends its light to everything.

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

Swami Vivekananda
Each man is divine. Each man that you see is a God by his very nature.

Swami Vivekananda
Take any path you like; follow any prophet you like; but have only that method which suits your own nature, so that you will be sure to progress.

Swami Vivekananda
The progress and civilisation of the human race simply mean controlling this nature.

Swami Vivekananda
You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds

Swami Vivekananda
It is the same India which has withstood the shocks of centuries, of hundreds of foreign invasions of hundreds of upheavals of manners and customs. It is the same land which stands firmer than any rock in the world, with its undying vigour, indestructible life. Its life is of the same nature as the soul, without beginning and without end, immortal; and we are the children of such a country.

Swami Vivekananda
If you think that you are bound, you remain bound; you make your own bondage. If you know that you are free, you are free this moment. This is knowledge, knowledge of freedom. Freedom is the goal of all nature.

Swami Vivekananda
God is cruel and not cruel. He is all being and not being at the same time. Hence He is all contradictions. Nature also is nothing but a mass of contradictions.

Swami Vivekananda
Impurity is a mere superimposition under which your real nature has become hidden. But the real you is already perfect, already strong.

Swami Vivekananda
External nature is only internal nature writ large.

Swami Vivekananda
If a piece of burning charcoal be placed on a man's head, see how he struggles to throw it off. Similar will be the struggle for freedom of those who really understand that they are slaves of nature.

Swami Vivekananda
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.

Swami Vivekananda
Each man is perfect by his nature; prophets have manifested this perfection, but it is potential in us.

Swami Vivekananda