Category: Swami Vivekananda Quotes

It is our duty to do that work which will exalt and ennoble us in accordance with the ideals and activities of the society in which we are born. But it must be particularly remembered that the same ideals and activities do not prevail in all societies and countries; our ignorance of this is the main cause of much of the hatred of one nation towards another.

It is the worker who is attached to results that grumbles about the nature of the duty which has fallen to his lot; to the unattached worker all duties are equally good. To the grumbler all duties are distasteful; nothing will ever satisfy him, and his whole life is doomed to prove a failure.

We should always try to see the duty of others through their own eyes, and never judge the customs of other people by our own standard. I am not the standard of the universe. I have to accommodate myself to the world, and not the world to me.

If we were really unattached, we should escape all the pain of vain expectation, and could cheerfully do good work in the world. Never will unhappiness or misery come through work done without attachment.

We should not hate anyone. This world will always continue to be a mixture of good and evil. Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to love even the wrongdoer. The world is a grand moral gymnasium wherein we have all to take exercises so as to become stronger and stronger spiritually.

Life is good or evil according to the state of mind in which we look at it, it is neither by itself. Fire, by itself, is neither good nor evil. When it keeps us warm we say, “How beautiful is fire!” When it burns our fingers, we blame it. Still, in itself it is neither good nor bad. According as we use it, it produces in us the feeling of good or bad; so also is this world.

Work for work’s sake. There are some who work for work’s sake, who do not care for name, or fame, or even to go to heaven. They work just because good will come of it. If a person works without any selfish motive in view, does he not gain anything? Yes, he gains the highest.

Be unselfish. What this means is – that you are part of me, and I of you… in hurting you I hurt myself, and in helping you I help myself. We cannot leave one of our fellow beings without helping him, that in this good consists my good.

The lower the animal, the more is its enjoyment in the senses, the more it lives in the senses. Civilization, true civilization, should mean the power of taking the animal-man out of his sense-life – by giving him visions and tastes of planes much higher – and not external comforts.

Everybody is hypnotised already. The work of attaining freedom, of realising one’s real nature, consists in de-hypnotisation. One thing to be remembered is that we are not gaining powers at all. We have them already. The whole process of growth is de-hypnotisation.

Never quarrel about religion. All quarrels and disputations concerning religion simply show that spirituality is not present. Religious quarrels are always over the husks. When purity, when spirituality goes, leaving the soul dry, quarrels begin, and not before.

All regulations in eating, practicing, etc., are all right so long as they are complementary to a spiritual aspiration; but they are not ends in themselves; they are only helps.