- We learn in him (Ramakrishna) that greatness, and harmony, and beauty are all results. Our concern is not with them, but with those more elemental matters of simplicity and sincerity and whole-hearted devotion that lie close to us.
- To me it has always appeared that she(Sarada Devi) is Sri Ramakrishna’s final word as to the ideal of Indian womanhood. But is she the last of an old order, or the beginning of a new?
- Burning renunciation was chief of all the inspirations that spoke to us through him (Vivekananda). “Let me die a true Sannyasin as my Master did”, he exclaimed once, passionately, heedless of money, of women, and of fame! And of these the most insidious is the love of fame!
- The selfless man is the thunderbolt. Let us strive only for selflessness, and we become the weapon in the hands of the gods. Not for us to ask how. Not for us to plan methods. For us, it is only to lay ourselves down at the altar-foot.
- In nation-making there is but one ideal, carried out by different methods, and the interest is the common interest of self-sacrifice.
- Immense batteries may be made by numbers of people uniting together to think a given thought. If the whole of India could agree to give, say, ten minutes every evening, at the oncoming of darkness, to thinking a single thought, “We are one. We are one. …”-the power that would be generated can hardly be measured.
- The ideas and ideals that constitute India have never suffered any rude wholesale interruption. They have grown steadily, always ready to adopt a new light on the old truth, the most extraordinary example in the world of absorption mingled with conservatism. Acceptance and resistance in one breath!
- I believe that India is one, indissoluble, indivisible. National unity is built on the common home, the common interest and the common love.
- None is really taught by another. True teaching is always self- teaching. Real education is self- education. By our own vision of the ideal, and by our own struggle to reach its height do we really rise; by no other means whatsoever.
- The training of the attention-rather than the learning of any special subject, or the development of any particular faculty-has always been as the Swami Vivekananda claimed for it, the chosen goal of Indian education.
- We must have technical education and we must have also higher research, because technical education, without higher research, is a branch without a tree, a blossom without any root.
- Unless we train the feelings and the choice, our man is not educated. He is only decked out in certain intellectual tricks that he has learnt to perform. By these tricks he can earn his bread. He cannot appeal to the heart, or give life. He is not a man at all; he is a clever ape.
- It is not by teaching a Bengali girl French, or the piano, but by enabling her to think about India, that we really educate her, and make for her one with whom the world’s greatest minds are proud to be associated.
- If it be a duty to distribute food, if it be a duty to help the sick and wounded, is it not ten times a duty to carry to those who have not enjoyed it, the lamp of knowledge, that their days may be made a delight, and their lives a power?
- We must surround our children with the thought of their nation and their country. The centre of gravity must lie, for them, outside the family.
- It is not the amount of a man’s reading, but the amount of his thinking, that marks the degree at which the education has arrived. Thought, thought, thought, the struggle for new thought, every moment spent in the endeavour, this is the path. and for this, the interchange of thought is necessary.
- We must become missioners of thought, missioners of knowledge, apostles of education, sent to one another. Each of us who receives a definite schooling, might try to share something of what he has gained with two others in his home who have not received it. It is little by little, brick by brick, that the greatest of cities grows up.
- The highest art is always charged with spiritual intensity, with intellectual and emotional revelation. It follows that it requires the deepest and finest kind of education.
- It is through the heart that the artist must do all his seeing. For Art, like science, like education, like industry, like trade itself, must now be followed “For the remaking of the Mother-land” and for no other aim.
- It appears nothing in what form the ideal appears to us; it matters not at all whether the upward path is hard or easy. All that matters is our own struggle. By that do we rise.
- The test of freedom is the capacity to feel it; the very sensing of freedom is freedom; aye, the very thought is freedom. Whosoever has sensed the Reality beyond the bondage of life, he, indeed, is the Free One.
- Before freedom comes training. The child must be disciplined that man may be free. Discipline means, before all things, the mastery of how to obey.
- To Indian thought alone, there is nothing startling in the words to labour is to pray. Its own message has been nothing less. Struggle is worship. What else does the Gita teach its people? All knowledge is beatitude.
- A man must be judged not by his intellectual standards, but by the depth and purport of his desires. A man may be a fool in technical and academic knowledge and yet a sage in the way he feels and desires.
- The Samaj is the strength of the family: the home is behind the civic life: and the civic life sustains the nationality. This is the formula of human combination.
- Anything may be achieved by thought. Death, disease, poverty, humiliation, any or all of those may be overcome. The one thought,”I am the strong! I am the strong!” earnestly held, calmly, confidently, unwaveringly and yet silently asserted, is enough.
- Let us then shake off all our frailties and weaknesses, our sighs and despair, and proclaim to ourselves with the utmost emphasis, that we are by our very nature deathless and pure, ever-blessed and self-effulgent.
- Real life begins when we die to the world of senses. We become immortal when we are veritable strangers in this land of death. No wonder that spirituality will appear as insanity’s twin to those whose minds cannot rise above the considerations of the flesh. To the earth- bound, even the poet or the scientist is a queer specimen of humanity.
- If we learn nothing else, let us learn to give, let us learn to serve, let us learn to renounce. Let us root out the last remnant of “shopkeeping” from our hearts. Let us offer ourselves and all that we are, not for the sake of self-culture, but for the ideal itself.
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