Swami Vivekananda Quotes

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

We are what our thoughts have made us

That I am not my experiences is very obvious. I am the one who is having those experiences. Spirituality has nothing to do with experience.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person. We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence.

I desire therefore I exist.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

The "ego" like its correlative "non-ego", is the product of the body, mind etc. The only proof of the existence of the real Self is realisation.

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This gives you a clue.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

I have to live in the truth that this is who I am. That's what I need to focus on.

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

The mind, whatever else it is, is a constant of everyone's experience, and, in more ways than we know, the creator of the reality that we live within... Nothing is more essential to us.

As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

I don't think I'm tangible to myself.

Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point.

At times I think and at times I am.