Sayings of Swami Vivekananda

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.

You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.

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

External nature is only internal nature writ large.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 are not understanding it in the right light. throw the burden on yourselves!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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