Swami Sivananda Quotes

I think the dual existence thing is a regular pastime for all human beings, and for that matter anything in this universe.

Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.

We divide ourselves up into spirit and human, but essentially we are all a part of the same world.

Hope is at once both simple and profound. It is hope that binds Heaven and earth. Hope is the bridge between Heaven and earth.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Every great group is an island... but an island with a bridge to the mainland.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn't got one.

Your mouth on mine our bridge to cross and serve where we would go. Utopia of sensations the flesh could never know.

I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

Man is one world, and hath / Another to attend him.

On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed.

A stage play ought to be the point of intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, or, in other words, the display, the manifestation of the hidden.

Every sin already carries grace within in, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life. The Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin.

For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning. (The Child from the Sea)

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.

Man is not only a contributory creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself, and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.

If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.