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Swami Vivekananda Quotes on Life

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) presented the philosophical teaching of his master Ramakrishna and the wider Vedantic tradition to a Western audience through the lectures delivered at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions and during his subsequent tours of the United States and Britain. The principal teaching is the practical Vedanta: the Advaita doctrine that the divine reality is the only ultimate truth and that the apparent self of ordinary experience is one with that reality, presented in a form designed to support actual life-practice rather than scholastic exposition. The framework integrates the traditional yogic disciplines (jnana, bhakti, karma, raja) and shaped the modern reception of Hindu philosophy in the West and the religious reform movements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India alike.

Quotes

  • “Arise, awake, and stop not until the goal is reached.”

    Public Addresses

  • Attributed to Swami Vivekananda:

    “We are what our thoughts have made us.”

  • Attributed to Swami Vivekananda:

    “Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life. Think of it, dream of it, live on that idea.”

  • “And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands and they are gone forever. What is the history of your America, your Australia and New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive.”

    Swami Vivekananda Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

  • “A perfect life is a contradiction in terms.”

    Swâmi Vivekânanda on Râja Yoga (1899), Ch. VI : Pratyâhâra and Dhâraṇâ

  • “Death is better than a vegetating ignorant life; it is better to die on the battle-field than to live a life of defeat.”

    Call to the Nation

  • “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.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is unrighteousness, fear is wrong life. All the negative thoughts and ideas that are in the world have proceeded from this evil spirit of fear.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “What the world wants is character. The world is in need of those whose life is one burning love, selfless. That love will make every word tell like a thunderbolt.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “Where can we go to find God if we cannot see Him in our own hearts and in every living being?”

    Pearls of Wisdom

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