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SWAMI VIVEKANANDA QUOTES: 20 quotes to enhance your daily life

Last updated: April 4th, 2019

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In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart. – Swami Vivekananda (following quotes all by Swami Vivekananda)

In a day, when you don’t come across any problems—you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path.

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

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

The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: the man or woman who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish person, is the most successful.

The greatest sin is to think yourself weak.

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

Anything that makes weak—physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

peace-meadow-touch-finger-plant-swami vivekananda

Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes.

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life; dream of it; think of it; live on that idea. Let the brain, the body, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, and this is the way great spiritual giants are produced.

The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.

The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.

The only religion that ought to be taught is the religion of fearlessness. Either in this world or in the world of religion, it is true that fear is the sure cause of degradation and sin. It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.

Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy—by one, or more, or all of these—and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.

The cheerful mind perseveres and the strong mind hews its way through a thousand difficulties.

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 power is within you; you can do anything and everything. Believe in that, do not believe that you are weak; do not believe that you are half-crazy lunatics, as most of us do nowadays. You can do anything and everything, without even the guidance of any one. Stand up and express the divinity within you.


image 1: Young woman practicing yoga on the beach via Shutterstock; image 2: Hand of a man above a blue flower via Shutterstock

  1. Many of these quotes inspire me; I have a little trouble with a few…”the greatest sin is to think yourself weak”, for example. I think of weakness simply as something to surrender, not as a sin. There’s a little too much “stiff upper lip” in several of these quotes for me…not natural, for me. I think acknowledging imperfection as humility. What about the Christian hymn lines, “I am weak but Thou are strong…”? I regard Swami Vivekananda as a very very high being, but what I wrote above is true for me. I think one or two of his quotes above can engender shame, at least for a modern Westerner.

    1. I see what you mean. Though quotes are great in a number of ways, one deficiency is that they are taken out of context. I was just having a discussion last night about how the Buddha taught to individual people not just to groups. What he taught was meant for that one person, yet many of those teachings have entered the public discourse as if it was meant for everyone and now that millions of books have been sold with what was originally a verbal account…! That’s an extreme example, but the same thing could be happening with these (or other quotes by a spiritual teacher). Anyways, in the end they make more sense when in context. Vivekananda may have defined weakness as quite different from what we normally think of weakness, but out of context we don’t really know. I think the main thing behind quotes is to elicit some interest in the reader to read more of the author’s work.

  2. what you say of Buddha was true of MB, too. I’ve been very inspired by Vivekananda since encountering him as a young man as a character in THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA. It may indeed be that he did mean something other than what I took from his words.

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