Swami Vivekananda

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.

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 …

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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"; …

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

External nature is only internal nature writ large.

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

You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.