1001Philosophers

Swami Vivekananda Quotes on Time

Swami Vivekananda's remarks on time, gathered here, are oriented above all toward the future, the future of the individual, of India, and of humanity. He saw his own age as a decisive moment and famously called for a concentrated national effort, urging that for the next fifty years every other concern give way to the work of regeneration. What endures across time, in his view, is character: it is the patient building of character, the intense struggle to realize the truth, which alone will tell in the future of humanity. Drawn largely from Pearls of Wisdom and his public addresses, these passages treat time less as an abstract metaphysical problem than as an arena of effort, in which present striving and self-discipline shape what is to come.

Quotes

  • “Vivekananda, The Future of India, Complete works vol 3.”

    This is the ancient land where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country, the same India whose influx of spirituality is represented, as it were, on the material plane, by rolling rivers like oceans, where the eternal Himalayas, rising tier above tier with their snowcaps, look as it were into the very mysteries of heaven. Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the f

  • “The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. . . . It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong. . . . For the next fifty years. ... let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything. . . . The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. ... He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”

    Quoted from Will Durant , Our Oriental Heritage.

  • “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.

  • “All truth is eternal . Truth is nobody’s property; no race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all souls.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “Go on saying, “I am free.” Never mind if the next moment delusion comes and says, “I am bound.” Dehypnotize the whole thing.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “It is the patient building of character, the intense struggle to realize the truth, which alone will tell in the future of humanity.”

    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

  • “Education is the manifestation of perfection present already in man. Religion is the manifestation of the divinity already in man.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

  • “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.”

    Pearls of Wisdom

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