Inspirational quotes of Swami Vivekananda

1.We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the
blame, none has the praise.

2.Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot,
fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.

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

4.When we really begin to live in the world, then we understand what is
meant by brotherhood or mankind, and not before.

5.External nature is only internal nature writ large.

6.The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.

7.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.

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

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

10.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.

11.The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body,
the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in
him — that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes,
and I am free.

12.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.

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

14.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.

15.The goal of mankind is knowledge. . . . Now this knowledge is inherent in
man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man
“knows,” should, in strict psychological language, be what he “discovers” or
“unveils”; what man “learns” is really what he discovers by taking the cover
off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

16.If money help a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if
not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the
better.

17.All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because
oneness is the secret of everything.

18.To devote your life to the good of all and to the happiness of all is
religion. Whatever you do for your own sake is not religion.

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

20.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 of
cold, and all the dualism of nature, although it lends its light to
everything.

21.It is our own mental attitude which makes the world what it is for us.
Our thought make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole
world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light. First,
believe in this world — that there is meaning behind everything. Everything
in the world is good, is holy and beautiful. If you see something evil,
think that you do not understand it in the right light. Throw the burden on
yourselves!

22.In one word, this ideal is that you are divine.

23.All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put
our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.

24.If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I
am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would
have vanished.

25.Where can we go to find God if we cannot see Him in our own hearts and in
every living being.

26.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.

27.The Vedanta recognizes no sin it only recognizes error. And the greatest
error, says the Vedanta is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner,
a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and
that.

28.Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest
heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin – to say that you
are weak, or others are weak.

30.Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be
true.

31.Look upon every man, woman, and everyone as God. You cannot help anyone,
you can only serve: serve the children of the Lord, serve the Lord Himself,
if you have the privilege.

About Swami Vivekananda:

Swami Vivekananda (January 12, 1863 - July 4, 1902), whose pre-monastic name was Narendranath Dutta ( Nôrendrônath Dôt-tô), was one of the most famous and influential spiritual leaders of the philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga and a major figure in the history of Hinduism and India. He was the chief disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the founder of Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission.

While he is widely credited with having uplifted his own nation, simultaneously he introduced Yoga and Vedanta to America and England with his popular lectures and private discourses on Vedanta philosophy. Vivekananda was the first known Hindu Swami to come to the West, where he introduced Eastern thought at the World’s Parliament of Religions, in connection with the World’s Fair in Chicago, in 1893. It was there that he was catapulted to fame by his by wide audiences in Chicago and then later elsewhere in America.