Swami Vivekananda Quotes

The more man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the more, not the less, truly he is man.

You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your inner enlightenment.

Darkness, that here surrounds our purblind understanding, will vanish at the dawning of eternal day.

Like the ocean is your god-self; It remains for ever undefiled. And like the ether it lifts but the winged. Even like the sun is your god-self; It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent. But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being. Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.

You can call it godliness - it IS godliness. It is the highest, the greatest flowering of being. But it is not a God somewhere outside you. You cannot pray to it. You can be it, but you cannot pray to it, because it is not separate.

The inner light actually comes from the soul; it is already inside us. The moment we can have free access to our soul, we will see that this light is coming to the fore to permeate our whole outer existence.

The fundamental principle of Christianity is to be what God is, and he is light.

The soul has come to the physical realm to have a direct experience of itself as an "individuation of divinity."

Inner darkness, which we call ignorance, is the root of suffering. The more inner light that comes, the more darkness will diminish. This is the only way to achieve salvation or nirvana.

We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.

The highest and greatest goal that every soul has to reach is God. As everything needs renunciation, that highest goal needs the highest renunciation.

Books cannot teach God, but they can destroy ignorance; their action is negative.

T is the Divinity that stirs within us.

It takes quite a while for the living to catch up with the believing, but of course it can. As we live up to the highest light we have, more light is given.

We are aspects of Divinity, in the process of knowing ourselves experientially.

There is a divinity within our breast.

First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods. "Be and make." Let this be our motto. Say not man is a sinner. Tell him that he is a God. Even if there were a devil, it would be our duty to remember God always, and not the devil.

God is your very being. So the first thing is, don't think about enlightenment as a goal.

Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or temples, or churches or books, are only the supports, the help of his spiritual childhood.

Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.

I direct my attention to the individual, to make him strong, to teach him that he himself is divine, and I call upon men to make themselves conscious of this divinity within. That is really the ideal --conscious or unconscious --of every religion.

Each soul is potentially divine.

To seek Divinity merely in books is to seek the living among the dead... seek God within your own soul.

Ignorance of God and of ourselves is the great principle and cause of all our disquietments; and, this ariseth mostly not from want of light and instruction, but for want of consideration and application.

When an unbaked pot is broken, the potter can use the mud to make a new one; but when a baked one is broken, he cannot do the same any longer. So when a person dies in a state of ignorance, he is born again; but when he becomes well baked in the fire of true knowledge and dies a perfect man, he is not born again.