Swami Sivananda Quotes

My lectures, based on Islamic teachings, were on various subjects. Some of the titles were, 'The Intoxication of Life,' 'The Purpose of Life,' 'The Real Cause of Man's Distress,' 'The Journey to the Goal in Life,' and, one of my favorites, 'The Heart of Man.' They contained important insights that spoke to something deep inside me.

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent influence.

A sincere seeker knows what his goal is: the highest Truth. He will not delay his journey. In spiritual life, we aspire for the highest Truth, for God, nothing else.

You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.

Of this our true individual life, our present life is a glimpse, a fragment, a hint, and in its best moments a visible beginning.

Who is God? Who are we? What is our purpose? All these questions remain unanswered. I want to reach the genuine seeker of spiritual well-being. My goal is to satisfy the hunger and longing for those who are seeking the truth.

The last part of life is a spiritual concern. You need to find a context to put your life into, that will allow you to go through it with as much grace and balance as possible, even if there is rebellion and adventure and exploration and resistance.

All of us, at different times of life, are looking for answers. It happened to me a decade ago and led me to the path of wanting to know more. I read Osho, Sadhguru, Deepak Chopra, and Parmananda Yogi. I haven't found the ultimate answer. The journey is the answer.

The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.

THE PATH IS exceedingly vast. From ancient times to the present day, even the greatest sages were unable to perceive and comprehend the entire truth; the explanation and teachings of masters and saints express only part of the whole. It is not possible for anyone to speak of such things in their entirety. Just head for the light and heat, learn from the gods, and through the virtue of devoted practice of the Art of Peace, become one with the divine.

Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead. The Art of Peace is a celebration of the bonding of heaven, earth, and humankind. It is all that is true, good, and beautiful.

The purpose of life is to realize God within ourselves. This can be done even whilst attending to our worldly duties.

Your sole purpose in life is to attain God-realization. All else is useless and worthless.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!

Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

The purpose of God's creations and of His giving us life is to allow us to have the learning experience necessary for us to come back to Him, to live with Him in eternal life.

If we're interested in spiritual things, we gradually realize that what we really need is to understand this nature that seems to be a bottomless basket, because there is no peace in it.

To ignore one's spiritual self is unsettling, to say the least. That's a very profound outlook on it.

The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. And I have no reason to abandon it because it leads to where I want to go.

Real music is not for wealth, not for honours or even the joys of the mind... but as a path for realisation and salvation.

You know, it's a different world now, but to skip ahead and really answer your question, only in the last five years did I find what I call holy maturity, finding the balance, finding the right person in my life so that I could live a normal life.

As we've lost this idea of pilgrimage, we've lost this idea of human beings walking for a very, very long time. It does change you.

God has a plan for you - I can promise you that. Your life is sacred. There is and always has been a path for your soul, and if you follow that path, it will lead you to the inner utopia that your soul longs to experience in this lifetime.

The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.