Great Throughts Treasury

"The idea of duty varies much among different nations: in one country, if a man does not do certain things, people will say he has acted wrongly; while if he does those very things in another country, people will say that he did not act rightly; and yet we know that there must be some universal idea of duty.....The important thing is to know that there are gradations of duty and of morality---that the duty of one state of life, in one set of circumstances will not and cannot be that of another."

"The idea of freedom is the only true idea of salvation--freedom from everything, the senses, whether of pleasure or pain, from good as well as evil. More than this even. We must be free from death; and to be free from death, we must be free from life. Life is but a dream of death. Where there is life, there will be death; so get away from life if you would be rid of death."

"The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence."

"The ideal man is he who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest activity, and in the midst of intensest activity finds the silence and solitude of the desert. He has learned the secret of restraint, he has controlled himself. He goes through the streets of a big city with all its traffic, and his mind is as calm as if he were in a cave, where not a sound could reach him; and he is intensely working all the time. That is the ideal of Karma-Yoga, and if you have attained to that you have really learned the secret of work."

"The infinite library of the universe is in our own mind."

"The ideal of all education, all training, should be this man-making. But instead of that, we are always trying to polish up the outside. What use is polishing up the outside when there is no inside? The end and aim of all training is to make the man grow. The man who influences, who throws his magic, as it were, upon his fellow-beings, is a dynamo of power, and when that man is ready, he can do anything and everything he likes; that personality put upon anything will make it work."

"The ideal of faith in ourselves is of the greatest help to us. If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practised, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have, would have vanished. Throughout the history of mankind, if any motive power has been more potent than another in the lives of all great men and women, it is that of faith in themselves. Born with the consciousness that they were to be great, they became great."

"The intensive love that humanity has ever known has come from religion, and the most diabolical hatred that humanity has known has also come from religion. No other human motive had deluged the world with blood so much as religion; at the same time, nothing has brought into existence so many hospitals and asylums for the poor; no other human influence has taken such care, not only of humanity, but also the lowest of animals, as religion has done. Nothing makes us so cruel as religion, and nothing makes us so tender as religion."

"The ideal of man is to see God in everything. But if you cannot see Him in everything, see Him in one thing, in that thing which you like best, and then see Him in another. So on you can go."

"The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. God is within us. He is the Soul of our souls. See Him in your own soul. That is practical religion. That is freedom."

"The important thing is how much less you think of the body, of yourself as matter—as dead, dull, insentient matter; how much more you think of yourself as shining immortal being. The more you think of yourself as spirit, the more eager you will be to be absolutely free from matter, body and senses. This is the intense desire to be free."

"The knowing ones must have pity on the ignorant."

"The man from whom this veil is being lifted is the more knowing man; the man upon whom it lies thick is ignorant, and the man from whom it has entirely gone is all-knowing, omniscient."

"The meditative state is the highest state of existence. So long as there is desire, no real happiness can come. It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness."

"The mind cannot be easily conquered. Minds that rise into waves at the approach of every little thing, at the slightest provocation or danger, in what a state they must be! What to talk of greatness or spirituality, when these changes come over the mind? This unstable condition of the mind must be changed. We must ask ourselves how far we can be acted upon by the external world, and how far we can stand on our own feet in spite of all the forces outside us. When we have succeeded in preventing all the forces in the world from throwing us off our balance, then alone we have attained to freedom, and not before. That is salvation."

"The Land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards generosity, towards purity, towards calmness - it is India."

"The less passion there is, the better we work. The calmer we are the better for us and the more the amount of work we can do. When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work."

"The less the thought of the body, the better it is. For it is the body that drags us down. It is attachment, identification which makes us miserable. That is the secret: to think that I am the spirit and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings--scenes on a canvas--of which I am the witness."

"The Lord is great! - He will not allow me to become a hypocrite. Now let what is in come out...."

"The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna. I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there."

"The life of Buddha shows that even a man who does not believe in God, has no metaphysics, belongs to no sect, and does not go to any church, or temple, and is a confessed materialist, even he can attain to the highest. … He was the only man who was ever ready to give up his life for animals to stop a sacrifice. He once said to a king:’If the sacrifice of a lamb helps you to go to heaven, sacrificing a man will help you better; so sacrifice me.’ The king was astonished."

"The lower the organization, the greater the pleasure in the senses. Very few men can eat a meal with the same gusto as a dog or a wolf. But all the pleasures of the dog or the wolf has gone, as it were into the senses. The lower types of humanity in all nations find pleasure in the senses, while the cultured and educated find it in thought, in philosophy, in arts and sciences, Spirituality is a still higher plane."

"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."

"The mind generally takes up various objects, runs into all sorts of things. That is the lower state. There is a higher state of the mind, when it takes up one object and excludes all others."

"The mind is but the subtle part of the body. You must retain great strength in your mind and words."

"The mind uncontrolled and unguided will drag us down, down, for ever — rend us, kill us; and the mind controlled and guided will save us, free us."

"The miseries of the world cannot be cured by physical help only. Until man's nature changes, these physical needs will arise, and miseries will always be felt, and no amount of physical help will cure them completely. The only solution to this problem is to make mankind pure. Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before."

"The mind takes up various objects, runs into all sorts of things. That is the lower state. There is a higher state of the mind, when it takes up one subject, and excludes all others..."

"The mind tries to think of one object, to hold itself to one particular spot, as the top of the head, the heart, etc,....and if the mind succeeds in receiving the sensations only through that part of the body, and through no other part, that would be Dharana, and when the mind succeeds in keeping itself in that state for some time it is called Dhyana (meditation)."

"The mistake is that we cling to the body when it is the spirit that is really immortal."

"The mind has to be gradually and systematically brought under control. The will has to be strengthened by slow, continuous and persevering drill. This is no child's play, no fad to be tried one day and discarded the next. It is a life's work; and the end to be attained is well worth all that it can cost us to reach it; being nothing less than the realization of our absolute oneness with the Divine. Surely, with this end in view, and with the knowledge that we can certainly succeed, no price can be too great to pay."

"The moment you fear, you are nobody. It is fear that is the great cause of misery in the world. It is fear that is the greatest of all superstitions. It is the fear that is the cause of our woes, and it is fearlessness that brings heaven in a moment."

"The more advanced a society or nation is in spirituality, the more is that society or nation civilized. No nation can be said to have become civilized, only because it has succeeded in increasing the comforts of material life by bringing into use lots of machinery and things of that sort. ... In this age as on the one hand people have to be intensely practical, so on the other they have to acquire deep spiritual knowledge."

"The more this power of concentration, the more knowledge is acquired, because this is the one and only method of acquiring knowledge. Even the lowest shoeblack, if he gives more concentration, will black shoes better; the cook with concentration will cook a meal all the better. In making money, or in worshipping God, or in doing anything, the stronger the power of concentration, the better will that thing be done. This is the one call, the one knock, which opens the gates of nature, and lets out floods of light."

"The more we grow in love and virtue and holiness, the more we see love and virtue and holiness outside. All condemnation of others really condemns ourselves. Adjust the microcosm (which is in your power to do) and the macrocosm will adjust itself for you. It is like the hydrostatic paradox, one drop of water can balance the universe. We cannot see outside what we are not inside. The universe is to us what the huge engine is to the miniature engine; and indication of any error in the tiny engine leads us to imagine trouble in the huge one."

"The motive is the measure of your work. What motive can be higher than that you are God, and that the lowest man is also God?"

"The more you think of yourself as shining immortal spirit, the more eager you will be to be absolutely free of matter, body, and senses. This is the intense desire to be free."

"The nature of the brute is to remain where he is, of a human being to seek good and to avoid evil, and of God to neither seek nor avoid but just to be eternally blissful. Let us be Gods, let us make our hearts like an ocean, to go beyond all the trifles of the world and see it only as a picture. We can then enjoy it without being in any way affected by it."

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

"The mountains of today were the oceans of yesterday and will be oceans tomorrow. Everything is in a state of flux; the whole universe is a mass of change. But there is One who never changes, and that is God."

"The next great upheaval which is to bring about a new epoch will come from Russia or China."

"The observer in the psychic world needs to be very strong and scientifically trained."

"The Older I grow, the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness. This is my new gospel"

"The nearer we are to God, the less we will have occasions to cry or weep. The further we are from God, the more will long faces come. The more we know God, the more misery vanishes."

"The one eternal religion is applied to the opinions of various minds and various races. There never was my religion or yours, my national religion or your national religion; there never existed many religions, there is only the one. One infinite religion existed all through eternity and will ever exist, and this religion is expressing itself in various countries in various ways."

"The one great advantage of Bhakti is that it is the easiest and most natural way to reach the great divine end in view; it's great disadvantage is that in its lower forms it oftentimes degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crew in Hinduism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity, have always been almost exclusively recruited from these worshippers [sic] on the lower planes of Bhakti. That singleness of attachment (Nishthâ) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of the denunciation of everything else. All the weak and undeveloped minds in every religion or country have only one way of loving their own ideal, i.e., by hating every other ideal. Herein is the explanation of why the same man who is so lovingly attached to his own ideal of God, so devoted to his own ideal of religion, becomes a howling fanatic as soon as he sees or hears anything of any other ideal."

"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."

"The only test of good things is that they make us strong."

"The only true duty is to be unattached and to work as free beings, to give up all work unto God."

"The only way of getting out divine nature manifested is by helping others to do the same. If there is inequality in nature, still there must be equal chance for all — or if greater for some and for some less — the weaker should be given more chance than the strong."