Great Throughts Treasury

"Believe in yourself and the world will be at your feet."

"Bhakti is greater than Karma, greater than Yoga, because these are intended for an object in view, while Bhakti is its own fruition, its own means and its own end."

"Bhakti is intense love to God. When a man gets it he loves all, hates none; he becomes satisfied for ever. This love cannot be reduced to any earthly benefit, because so long as worldly desires last that kind of love does not come."

"Bhakti admits no elements of fear, no being to be appeased or propitiated. There are even Bhaktas who worship God as their own child, so that there may remain no feeling even of awe or reverance. There can be no fear in true love, and so long as there is the least fear, Bhakti cannot even begin."

"Bhakti is its own fruition, its own means and its own end/"

"Bhakti-Yoga is a real, genuine search after the Lord, a search beginning, continuing and ending in Love. One single moment of the madness of extreme love to God brings us eternal freedom."

"Blame none for your own faults, stand upon your own feet, and take the whole responsibility upon yourselves. Say, This misery that I am suffering is of my own doing, and that very thing proves that it will have to be undone by me alone."

"Bhakti-Yoga does not say give up; it only says Love; love the Highest; and everything low naturally falls off from him, the object of whose love is this Highest."

"Blessed are they whose bodies get destroyed in the service of others."

"Blessedness, eternal peace arising from perfect freedom, is the highest conception of religion, underlying all the ideas of God in Vedanta---absolutely free existence, not bound by anything, no change, no nature, nothing that can produce a change in Him. The same freedom is in you and in me and is the only real freedom."

"Bless people when they revile you. Think how much good they are doing by helping to stamp out the false ego. Hold fast to the real Self. Think only pure thoughts, and you will accomplish more than a regiment of mere preachers. Out of purity and silence comes the word of power."

"Books are infinite in number and time is short. The secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it."

"Blows are what awaken us and help to break the dream. They show us the insufficiency of this world and make us long to escape, to have freedom."

"Both the forces of good and evil will keep the universe alive for us, until we awake from our dreams and give up this building of mud pies."

"But how can this difference of some being born happy and some unhappy be explained? They do nothing to make that difference! Not in this life, but they did in their last birth and the difference is explained by this action in the previous life."

"Brave, bold people, these are what we want. What we want is vigor in the blood, strength in the nerves, iron muscles and nerves of steel, not softening namby-pamby ideas. Avoid all these. Avoid all mystery. There is no mystery in religion."

"But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal."

"By doing well the duty which is nearest to us, the duty which is in our hands now, we make ourselves stronger; and improving our strength in this manner step by step, we may even reach a state in which it shall be our privilege to do the most coveted and honoured duties in life and in society."

"But there is yet time to change our ways. Give up all those old discussions, old fights about things which are meaningless, which are nonsensical in their very nature. Think of the last six hundred or seven hundred years of degradation when grown-up men by hundreds have been discussing for years whether we should drink a glass of water with the right hand of the left, whether the hand should be washed three times or four times, whether we should gargle five or six times. What can you expect from men who pass their lives in discussing such momentous questions as these and writing most learned philosophies on them! There is a danger of our religion getting into the kitchen. We are neither Vedantists, most of us now, nor Pauranics, nor Tantrics. We are just Don't-touchists. Our religion is in the kitchen. Our God is the cooking-pot, and our religion is, Don't touch me, I am holy. If this goes on for another century, every one of us will be in a lunatic asylum. It is a sure sign of softening of the brain when the mind cannot grasp the higher problems of life; all originality is lost, the mind has lost all its strength, its activity, and its power of thought, and just tries to go round and round the smallest curve it can find."

"By means of the constant effort to do good to others we are trying to forget ourselves; this forgetfulness of the self is the one great lesson we have to learn in life. Man thinks foolishly that he can make himself happy, and after years of struggle finds out at last that true happiness consists in killing selfishness and that no one can make him happy except himself."

"BY the study of different religions we find that in essence they are one."

"By studying the lives of all these great messengers, we find that each, as it were, was destined to play a part, and a part only; that the harmony consists in the sum total, and not in one note."

"By the grace of the Guru, a disciple becomes a Pandit (scholar) even without reading books."

"Calm and silent and steady work, and no newspaper humbug, no name-making, you must always remember."

"By the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world"

"Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles."

"Change is always subjective. All through evolution you find that the conquest of nature comes by change in the subject. Apply this to religion and morality, and you will find that the conquest of evil comes by the change in the subjective alone. That is how the Advaita system gets its whole force, on the subjective side of man. To talk of evil and misery is nonsense, because they do not exist outside. If I am immune against all anger, I never feel angry. If I am proof against all hatred, I never feel hatred."

"Character is manufactured by Karma."

"Character is repeated habits."

"Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another...But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood..... Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist... Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live..."

"Come out into the broad light of day, come out from the little narrow paths, for how can the infinite soul rest content to live and die in small ruts?"

"Comfort is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being comfortable."

"Come out into the universe of Light. Everything in the universe is yours, stretch out your arms and embrace it with love. If you every felt you wanted to do that, you have felt God."

"Coming to great leaders of mankind, we always find that it was the personality of the man that counted. Now, take all the great authors of the past, the great thinkers. Really speaking, how many thoughts have they thought? Take all the writings that have been left to us by the past leaders of mankind; take each one of their books and appraise them. The real thoughts, new and genuine, that have been thought in this world up to this time, amount to only a handful. Read in their books the thoughts they have left to us. The authors do not appear to be giants to us, and yet we know that they were great giants in their days. What made them so? Not simply the thoughts they thought, neither the books they wrote, nor the speeches they made, it was something else that is now gone, that is their personality. As I have already remarked, the personality of the man is two-thirds, and his intellect, his words, are but one-third. It is the real man, the personality of the man, that runs through us. Our actions are but effects. Actions must come when the man is there; the effect is bound to follow the cause."

"Come, be men ! Kick out the priests who are always against progress, because they would never mend, their hearts would never become big. They are the offspring of centuries of superstition and tyranny. Root out priest-craft first. Come, be men ! Come out of your narrow holes and have a look abroad. See how nations are on the march ! Do you love man ? Do you love your country ? Then come, let us struggle for higher and better things ; look not back, no, not even if you see the dearest and nearest cry. Look not back, but forward !"

"Concentration is the essence of all knowledge; nothing can be done without it. Ninety percent of thought force is wasted by the ordinary human being, and therefore he is constantly committing blunders; the trained man or mind never makes a mistake."

"Concentration of the powers of the mind is our only instrument to help us see God. If you know one soul (your own), you know all souls, past, present and to come. The will concentrates the mind, certain things excite and control this will, such as reason, love, devotion, breathing, etc. The concentrated mind is a lamp that shows us every corner of the soul."

"Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers and let them go their own way."

"Cultivate the virtue of obedience, but you must not sacrifice your own faith. No centralisation is possible unless there is obedience to superiors. No great work can be done without this centralisation of individual forces."

"Dare to be free, dare to go as far as your thought leads, and dare to carry that out in your life."

"Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side—in wave-like motions following each other. ...At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this life—prosperity, the education which procures more pleasures, more food—will become glorious at first and then that will degrade and degenerate. Along with the prosperity will rise to white heat all the inborn jealousies and hatreds of the human race. Competition and merciless cruelty will be the watchword of the day. To quote a very commonplace and not very elegant English proverb, Everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost, becomes the motto of the day. Then people think that the whole scheme of life is a failure. And the world would be destroyed had not spirituality come to the rescue and lent a helping hand to the sinking world. Then the world gets new hope and finds a new basis for a new building, and another wave of spirituality comes, which in time again declines. As a rule, spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centered in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then society has to help itself, and materialism comes to the rescue."

"Delusion will vanish as the light becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the sun alone shines."

"Dependence is misery. Independence is happiness."

"Desire can be eradicated from the roots by firmly imbibing the four attributes of: Jnan, Atmanishtha, Vairagya, Dharma and the full-fledged devotion to God."

"Death is better than a vegetating ignorant life; it is better to die on the battle-field than to live a life of defeat. This is the basis of religion. When a man takes this stand he is on the way to find the truth, he is on the way to God."

"Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery. The great secret of true success, of true happiness, is this: the person who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish person, is the most successful."

"Devotion to duty is the highest form of worship of God."

"Discriminate within yourself between the real and the unreal. Have you not read the Vedanta? Even when you sleep, keep the sword of discrimination at the head of your bed, so that covetousness cannot approach you even in dream. Practicing such strength, renunciation will gradually come, and then you will see the portals of heaven are wide open to you."

"Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage."

"Despondency is not religion, whatever else it may be."