Teachings of SWAMI VIVEKANANDA!

Personal Spititual Growth

"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest the divine within, by controlling nature external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control or philosophy....by one or more, or all of these....and be free."

 

"This is the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples or forms are but secondary details."

 

Peace and Harmony

"I would ask mankind to recognize this maxim: DO NOT DESTROY! Break not, pull not anything down, but build. Help, if you can; if you cannot, fold your hands and stand by and see things go on."

 

"Do not injure if you cannot render help. Say not a word against any man's convictions so far as they are sincere."

 

"Secondly, take man where he stands and from there give him a lift...and at the centre where all the radii meet all our differences will cease."

Social Justice

"My heart is too full to express my feeling: You know it, you can imagine it. So long as the millions live in humger and ignorance, I hold every man a 'traitor' who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them."

 

"....These men who strut about in their finery, having got all their money grinding the poor wretches, so long as they do not do anything for these millions, are no better than savages."

Faith, Strength, and Women

"Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth...sinners? It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter...."

"Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into their brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralyzing ones."

"Women must be in a position to solve their own problems in their own way. No one can or ought to do this for them. And our Indian women are as capable of doing it as any in the world."

 

Source: Different writings of Swami Vivekananda