The great lesson is, that unity is behind all.
Call it God, Love, Spirit, Allah, Jehovah -- it is the same unity that animates all life from the lowest animal to the noblest man.
Picture to yourself an ocean ice-bound, pierced with many different holes. Each of these is a soul, a man, emancipated according to his degree of intelligence, essaying to break through the ice.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Sunday Times, London’ Interview (1896)
Religion is realising, and I shall call you a worshipper of God when you have become able to realise the Idea. Before that it is the spelling of words and no more.
It is this power of realisation that makes religion; no amount of doctrines or philosophies, or ethical books, that you may have stuffed into your brain, will matter much -- only what you are and what you have realised.
- Swami Vivekananda,
On Bhakti-Yoga,
Notes from Lectures and Discourses
Every successful man must have behind him somewhere tremendous integrity, tremendous sincerity, and that is the cause of his signal success in life.
He may not have been perfectly unselfish; yet he was tending towards it. If he had been perfectly unselfish, his would have been as great a success as that of the Buddha or of the Christ.
The degree of unselfishness marks the degree of success everywhere.
- Swami Vivekananda,
On Karma-Yoga,
Notes from Lectures and Discourses
The real Self is free, yet when mixed with mind and body, It is not free. The will is the first manifestation of the real Self; the first limitation therefore of this real Self is the will.
Will is a compound of Self and mind.
Now, no compound can be permanent, so that when we will to live, we must die. Immortal life is a contradiction in terms, for life, being a compound, cannot be immortal.
True Being is undifferentiated and eternal.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Introduction to Jnana-Yoga’ – Talk in New York
The Mohammedans want to have the whole world Mohammedan; the Christians, Christian; and the Buddhists, Buddhist;
but Vedanta says, "Let each person in the world be separate, if you will; the one principle, the unity will be behind. The more prophets there are, the more books, the more seers, the more methods, so much the better for the world".
Just as in social life the greater the number of occupations in every society, the better for that society, the more chance is there for everyone of that society to make a living; so in the world of thought and of religion.
- Swami Vivekananda,
‘Methods and Purpose of Religion’ - Talk in England
