Ramdas Swami Quotes

Forget not the central truth that God is seated in your own heart. Don't be disheartened by failures at initial stages. Cultivate the spirit of surrender to the workings of His will in you and outside you until you have completely surrendered up your ego-sense, and have known He is in all and He is all, and you and He are one. ~ Swami Ramdas

The whole universe is permeated through and through with God," said Ramdas. "The visible and invisible worlds are all He - as manifest and unmanifest. There is nothing and none but He. All, all is He. Such is the truth. Where then is the idea of 'I' and 'you'–'mine' and 'yours'. All are He and His. ~ Swami Ramdas

God is an artist par excellence. He has painted the picturesque universe on the screen of His own immutable and glowing Spirit. So He is at once the painter and the painted. In the ultimate analysis, God and His lover, God and His devotee and servant, are He. The unmanifest--which is beyond all duality has become both. This secret few know. ~ Swami Ramdas

Remember the words of Christ: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." These words are literally true, not figures or fiction. They were the outflow of the heart's blood of one of the greatest sons of God who have ever come to this world of ours; words which came as the fruit of realisation, from a man who had felt and realised God himself; who had spoken with God, lived with God, a hundred times more intensely than you or I see this building. ~ Swami Vivekananda

This universe is the wreckage of the infinite on the shores of the finite. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Every wave of passion restrained is a balance in your favor. It is therefore good policy not to return anger for anger, as with all true morality. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The body is our enemy, and yet is our friend. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Stand up, be bold, and take the blame on your own shoulders. Do not go about throwing mud at others; for all the faults you suffer from, you are the sole and only cause. ~ Swami Vivekananda

What is now wanted is a combination of the greatest heart with the highest intellectuality, of infinite love with infinite knowledge. ~ Swami Vivekananda

RELATIONSHIPS & THE INNER BEING

The other is a mirror of our own face; the other is a mirror of our inner being.

The entire universe is a manifestation of our own inner being.

Man is the microcosm and the universe is the macrocosm.

In our inner being, we are one with all.

True relationships is to see ourselves in all beings and to see all beings in ourselves.

The inner being is not only present in human beings, but it is also present in flowers, trees, animals, stones and the stars.

The divine exists everywhere in nature.

Once we realize this we will never feel alone.

We find the communion of the heart everywhere. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

Never talk about the faults of others, no matter how bad they may be. Nothing is ever gained by that. You never help one by talking about his fault; you do him an injury, and injure yourself as well. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Love for yourselves means [in the end] love for everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda

What makes you weep, my friend? In you is all power. Summon up your all-powerful nature, O mighty one, and this whole universe will lie at your feet. It is the Self alone that predominates, and not matter. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The game of life has one rule: if you play, you lose. ~ Swami Chetanananda

I want to start two institutions, one in Madras and one in Calcutta, to carry out my plan; and that plan briefly is to bring the Vedantic ideals into the everyday practical life of the saint or the sinner, of the sage or the ignoramus, of the Brahmin or the Pariah. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Society is an organism which obeys the immutable law of progress; and change, judicious and cautious change, is necessary for the well being, and indeed the preservation of the social system. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The ideal of faith in ourselves is of the greatest help to us. If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished. Throughout the history of mankind, if any motive power has been more potent than another in the lives of all great men and women, it is that of faith in themselves. ~ Swami Vivekananda

You are all bound by the law of Karma, the Upanishads admit, but they declare the way out. ~ Swami Vivekananda

If a piece of burning charcoal be placed on a man's head, see how he struggles to throw it off. Similar will be the struggle for freedom of those who really understand that they are slaves of nature. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The body cannot be the soul. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Siva, O Siva, carry my boat to the other shore! ~ Swami Vivekananda

Even forgiveness, if weak and passive, is not true: fight is better. Forgive when you could bring legions of angels to the victory. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Yoga believes in transforming the individual before transforming the world. Whatever change we want to happen outside should happen within. If you walk in peace and express that peace in your very life, others will see you and learn something. ~ Swami Satchidananda

Everything progresses in waves. The march of civilization, the progression of worlds, is in waves. All human activities likewise progress in waves - art, literature, science, religion. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Your mind makes you dance like a monkey all the time ... Now you have to become stronger; you have to make the mind dance. Make it dance on the stage of mantra. For that, mediate and repeat mantra. ~ Swami Muktananda

Perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Therefore we must always expect to find things not up to our highest ideal. Knowing this, we are bound to make the best of everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Even as the lion, not trembling at noises; even as the wind, not caught in a net; even as the lotus-leaf, untouched by the water - so do thou wander alone like the rhinoceros! ~ Swami Vivekananda

Man is the apex of the only world we can ever know. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Take up an idea, devote yourself to it, struggle on in patience, and the sun will rise for you. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Delusion will vanish as the light becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the sun alone shines. ~ Swami Vivekananda

His accelerated path to yogihood hit a dead end when his kundalini exploded in a crowded department store. No one else was injured, but Swami caught an inflection which left him with a permanent East Indian accent. ~ Swami Beyondananda

Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The body is made by the thought that lies behind it. The body politic is thus the expression of national thought. ~ Swami Vivekananda

If our mind is in conflict, not balanced with our body and with the needs of the soul, then there is a fundamental disunity in our life. Only if we have unity within ourselves, we can create unity in the world around us. You can't give something you don't have, even if you have all good intentions ~ Radhanath Swami

any thought that gives you peace is a positive thought. The more you fill your mind with positive thoughts, the better your state of mind will be. And that naturally results in better physical health. ~ Om Swami

It is man's foremost duty to awaken the understanding of the inner self and to know his own real inner greatness. Once he knows his true worth, he can know the worth of others. ~ Swami Muktananda

Each atom is trying to fly off from its centre. In the internal world, each thought is trying to go beyond control. Again each particle in the external world is checked by another force, the centripetal, and drawn towards the centre. Similarly in the thought - world the controlling power is checking all these outgoing desires. ~ Swami Vivekananda

All is the Self or Brahman. The saint, the sinner, the lamb, the tiger, even the murderer, as far as they have any reality, can be nothing else, because there is nothing else. ~ Swami Vivekananda

This human body is the greatest body in the universe, and a human being the greatest being. Man is higher than all animals, than all angels; none is greater than man. Even the Devas (gods) will have to come down again and attain to salvation through a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, is evolved out of this Akasha. ~ Swami Vivekananda

One whose happiness is within, who is active within, who rejoices within and is illumined within, is actually the perfect mystic. He is liberated in the Supreme, and ultimately he attains the Supreme. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Take off the veil of hypnotism which you have cast upon the world, send not out thoughts and words of weakness unto humanity. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Spiritual life is not dry, it is also exceuted happily, 'susukham'. The result of that is not just happiness, but bliss, spiritual joy. ~ Bhakti Charu Swami

Things do not grow better; they remain as they are. It is we who grow better, by the changes we make in ourselves. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The goal of mankind is knowledge ... Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man 'knows', should, in strict psychological language, be what he 'discovers' or 'unveils'; what man 'learns' is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge. ~ Swami Vivekananda

About Swami Vivekanada: I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism ... But it was tremendous - something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings. ~ Chittaranjan Das