Paramahansa Yogananda Quotes

God puts you through things - steps in life - and you get over them.

At a certain point, I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity... to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules - lots of them - or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission.

I didn't come to Christianity for money, I came to Christianity because this is the way we can live a better life.

God never gives us more than we can handle. Everything that comes our way is coming our way so that we can grow and evolve.

I know it's an experience that I need to have if God's putting me through it.

For all its peculiarities and unevenness, the Bible has a simple story. God made man. Man rejected God. God won't give up until he wins him back. God will whisper. He will shout. He will touch and tug. He will take away our burdens; he'll even take away our blessings. If there are a thousand steps between us and him, he will take all but one. But he will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours. Please understand. His goal is not to make you happy. His goal is to make you His. His goal is not to get you what you want; it is to get you what you need.

We know we're coming full circle with God when we stand at a very similar crossroad where we made such a mess of life before, but this time we take a different road.

The pains that you suffer, the loneliness that you encounter, the experiences that are disappointing or distressing, the addictions and seeming pitfalls of your life are each doorways to awareness. Each offers you an opportunity to see beyond the illusion that serves as the balancing and growth of your soul.

Circumstances and crises are God's tools to move you into your purpose and the maximizing of your potential.

I have fallen short in my life, but my faith has always brought me home.

Every trial and experience you have passed through is necessary for your salvation.

God has a purpose behind every problem. He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I'm on course, and I'm doing what God wants me to do. I'm real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

And it took me, since I was 17 and left home, running from God, to now, as a 30-year-old man, when I honestly feel like I've come full circle and my heart's finally in the right place.

The word of God steadies me. He says your trials and tribulations make you who you are. So you can see my whole story in the way I endured and overcame some testing experiences.

In working with people across the country and around the world, I've come to know that most of us go through times that re-route our prayer life.

Each one of us has our own evolution of life, and each one of us goes through different tests which are unique and challenging. But certain things are common. And we do learn things from each other's experience. On a spiritual journey, we all have the same destination.

I believe that some of us who were kept by God a long while before we found Him love Him better perhaps than we should have done if we had received Him directly, and we can preach better to others - we can speak more of His loving-kindness and tender mercy.

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

In my case Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

If you wish to strengthen your confidence in God still more, often recall the loving way in which He has acted toward you, and how mercifully He has tried to bring you out of your sinful life, to break your attachment to the things of earth and draw you to His love.

You can only learn so much from books. You can only learn so much from education. Ultimately, it is the wisdom of God that will carry you through in the toughest situations of life.

Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.

Walt Disney got away with portraying me in the light that they were portraying me in. I have always been a fighter, so... But I have no regrets, man. It's just like God brought me through the drugs, I know he'll bring me through this.