Great Throughts Treasury

"If you want to be a yogi, you must be free, and place yourself in circumstances where you are alone and free from all anxiety. One who desires a comfortable and nice life and at the same time wants to realize the Self is like the fool who, wanting to cross the river, caught hold of a crocodile, mistaking it for a log of wood."

"If you want to do anything evil, do it before the eyes of your superiors."

"If you think about disaster, you will get it. Brood about death and you hasten your demise. Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience."

"If you think that you are bound, you remain bound; you make your own bondage. If you know that you are free, you are free this moment. This is knowledge, knowledge of freedom. Freedom is the goal of all nature."

"If you want to have life, you have to die every moment for it. Life and death are only different expressions of the same thing looked at from different standpoints; they are the falling and the rising of the same wave, and the two form one whole."

"In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart."

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

"Ignorance is death, knowledge is life."

"In Bhakti there is also no place for begging or bargaining with God. The idea of asking God for anything is sacrilege to a Bhakta. He will not pray for health or wealth or even to go to heaven."

"In a day when you don't come across any problems — you can be sure that you are traveling in the wrong path."

"In Buddha we had the great, universal heart and infinite patience, making religion practical and bringing it to everyone’s door. In Shankaracharya we saw tremendous intellectual power, throwing the scorching light of reason upon everything. We want today that bright sun of intellectuality joined with the heart of Buddha, the wonderful infinite heart of love and mercy. This union will give us the highest philosophy. Science and religion will meet and shake hands. Poetry and philosophy will become friends.What! Those giants of old, the ancient Rishis, who never walked but strode, of whom if you were to think but for a moment you would shrivel up into a moth, they sir, had time--and you have no time!"

"In doing evil we injure ourselves and others also. In doing good we do good to ourselves and to others as well. … According to Karma-Yoga, the action one has done cannot be destroyed until it has borne its fruit; no power in nature in nature can stop it from yielding its results. If I do an evil action, I must suffer for it; there is no power in this universe to stop or stay it. Similarly, if I do a good action, there is no power in the universe which can stop its bearing good results."

"In language and literature, in poetry and in arts, in everything we must point out not the mistakes that people are making in their thoughts and actions, but the way in which they will gradually be able to do these things better. Pointing out mistakes wounds a man's feelings. You have to grow from inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul."

"In everyone is God, the Atman; all else is but dream, an illusion."

"In one word, the ideal of Vedanta is to know man as he really is, and this is its message, that if you cannot worship your brother man, the manifested God, how can you worship a God who is unmanifested?"

"In perfect concentration the soul becomes actually free from the bonds of the gross body and knows itself as it is."

"In one word, this ideal is that you are divine."

"In our families there are the heads; some of them are successful, others are not. Why? We complain of others in our failures. The moment I am unsuccessful, I say, so-and-so is the cause of the failure. In failure, one does not like to confess one's own faults and weaknesses. Each person tries to hold himself faultless and lay the blame upon somebody else, or even on bad luck. When heads of families fail, they should ask themselves, why is it that some people manage a family so well and others do not. Then you will find that the difference is owing to the man---his presence, his personality."

"In some oil mills in India, bullocks are used that go round and round to grind the oilseed. There is a yoke on the bullock's neck. They have a piece of wood protruding from the yoke, and on that is fastened a wisp of straw. The bullock is blindfolded in such a way that it can only look forward, and so it stretches its neck to get at the straw; and in doing so, it pushes the piece of wood out a little further; and it makes another attempt with the same result, and yet another with the same result, and yet another, and so on. It never catches the straw, but goes round and round in the hope of getting it, and in so doing grinds out the oil. In the same way you and I who are born slaves of nature, money and wealth, wives and children, are always chasing a wisp of straw, a mere chimera, and going through an innumerable round of lives without obtaining what we seek. The great dream is love, we are all going to love and be loved, we are all going to be happy and never meet with misery, but the more we go towards happiness, the more it goes away from us."

"In real meditation you forget the body. You may be cut to pieces and not feel it at all. You feel such pleasure in it. You become so light. This perfect rest we will get in meditation."

"In the domain of true religion, book-learning has no right to enter."

"In the world take always the position of the giver. Give everything and look for no return. Give love, give help, give service, give any little thing you can, but keep out barter. Make no conditions and none will be imposed. Let us give out of our own bounty, just as God gives to us."

"In this external world, which is full of finite things, it is impossible to see and find the Infinite. The Infinite must be sought in that alone which is infinite, and the only thing infinite about us is that which is within us, our own soul. Neither the body, nor the mind, nor even our thoughts, nor the world we see around us, is infinite."

"In the study of religion the control of the mind is absolutely necessary. We have to turn the mind back upon itself in this study."

"In this world of many, he who sees the One, in this ever-changing world, he who sees Him, who never changes, as the Soul of his own soul, as his own Self, he is free, he is blessed, he has reached the goal."

"In this world always take the position of the giver. Give everything and look for no returns. Give love, give help, give service, give any little thing you can, but keep out barter. Make no conditions and none will be imposed. Let us give out of our own bounty, just as God gives to us. The Lord is the only Giver, all the world are only shopkeepers. Get His cheque and it must be honoured everywhere."

"Inactivity should be avoided by all means. Activity always means resistance. Resist all evils, mental and physical; and when you have succeeding in resisting, then will calmness come."

"Infinite strength is religion and God."

"Is it book-learning? No. Is it diverse knowledge? Not even that.."

"Is religion to justify itself by the discoveries of reason, through which every other concrete science justifies itself? Are the same methods of investigation which we apply to sciences and knowledge outside, to be applied to the science of Religion? In my opinion, this must be so, and I am also of opinion that the sooner it is done the better. If a religion is destroyed by such investigations, it was then all the time useless, unworthy superstition; and the sooner it goes the better. I am thoroughly convinced that its destruction would be the best thing that could happen. All that is dross would be taken off, no doubt, but the essential parts of religion will emerge triumphant out of this investigation. Not only will it be made scientific, as scientific at least, as any of the conclusions of physics or chemistry, but will have greater strength, because physics or chemistry has no internal mandate to vouch for its truth, which religion has."

"Is there a greater strength than that of Brahmacharyam--purity, my boy?"

"Is that education as a result of which the will, being continuously choked by force through generations, is now well-nigh killed out; is that education under whose sway even the old ideas, let alone the new ones are disappearing one by one; is that education which is slowly making man a machine?"

"It is a privilege to serve mankind, for this is the worship of God; God is here, in all these human souls. He is the soul of man."

"It is always for greater joy that you give up the lesser. This is practical religion—the attainment of freedom, renunciation. Renounce the lower so that you may get the higher. Renounce! Renounce! Sacrifice! Give up! Not for zero. Not for nothing, but to get the higher."

"It is an insult to a starving people to offer them religion; it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics."

"Is there any sex-distinction in the Atman (Self)? Out with the differentiation between man and woman—all is Atman! Give up the identification with the body, and stand up!"

"Infinite power of the spirit, brought to bear upon matter evolves material development, made to act upon thought evolves intellectuality, and made to act upon itself makes of man a God. First, let us be Gods, and then help other to be Gods. Be and Make. Let this be our motto."

"Isn’t it man that makes money? Where did you ever hear of money making man? If you can make your thoughts and words perfectly at one, if you can, I say, make yourself one in speech and action, money will pour in at your feet of itself, like water."

"Isolation of the soul from all objects, mental and physical, is the goal; when that is attained, the soul will find that it was alone all the time. and it required no one to make it happy. As long as we require someone else to make us happy we are slaves. When the Purusha finds that It is free, and does not require anything to complete Itself, that this Nature is quite unnecessary, then freedom is attained."

"It (Truth) has to be made practical, to be made simple (for the highest truths are always simple), so that it may penetrate every pore of human society, and become the property of the highest intellects and the commonest minds, of the man, woman, and child at the same time. All these ratiocinations of logic, all these bundles of metaphysics, all these theologies and ceremonies may have been good in their own time, but let us try to make things simpler and bring about the golden days when every man will be a worshipper, and the Reality in every man will be the object of worship."

"It has been a trite saying, that idolatry is wrong, and every man swallows it at the present time without questioning. I once thought so, and to pay the penalty of that I had to learn my lesson sitting at the feet of a man who realized everything through idols; I allude to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Take a thousand idols more if you can produce Ramakrishna Paramhamsas through idol worship, and may God speed you!"

"It cannot be that the soul knows, but it is knowledge. It cannot be that the soul is happy, it is happiness itself. That which is happy, has borrowed its happiness; that which has knowledge, has received its knowledge; and that which has relative existence, has only a reflected existence."

"It is good to love God for hope of reward, but it is better to love God for love’s sake; and the prayer goes: O Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth. But grant me this, that I may love thee without the hope of reward - ’love’ unselfishly for love’s sake."

"It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God."

"It is criticizing each other that is at the root of all mischief. That is the chief factor in breaking down organizations."

"It is better to wear out than rust out."

"It is child's talk that a man dies and goes to heaven. We never come nor go. We are where we are. All the souls that have been, are, and will be, are on one geometrical point."

"It is not sacrifice of a high order to die for one's young. The animals do that, and just as readily as any human mother ever did. It is no sign of real love to do that; it is merely blind emotion."

"It is love and love alone that I preach, and I base my teaching on the great Vedantic truth of the sameness and omnipresence of the Soul of the Universe."

"It is not that when a man becomes free, he will stop and become a dead lump; but he will be more active than any other being, because every other being acts only under compulsion, he alone through freedom."