Swami Vivekananda Quotes

Learning and wisdom are superfluities, the surface glitter merely, but it is the heart that is the seat of all power.

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.

Perfection is always infinite. We are the Infinite already.You and I, and all beings, are trying to manifest that infinity.

Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.

There is only one sin. That is weakness.... The only saint is that soul that never weakens, faces everything, and determines to die game.

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

He who in the midst of intense activity finds himself in the greatest calmness, and in the greatest peace finds intense activity, that is the greatest [Yogi as well as the wisest man]” (note 2).

take Buddha. The central idea [is] sacrifice.

The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert. He has learnt the secret of restraint, he has controlled himself.

A man is said to be [illumined] if his will has become firm, if his mind is not disturbed by misery, if he does not desire any happiness, if he is free of all [attachment], of all fear, of all anger

Impurity is a mere superimposition under which your real nature has become hidden. But the real you is already perfect, already strong.

Arjuna asks: “Who is a person of established will?

If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.

Unselfishness is God.

He who struggles is better than he who never attempts.