Voice of Vivekananda - II

• You are the makers of your own fortunes. You make yourselves suffer, you make good and evil, and it is you who put your hands before your eyes and say it is dark. Take your hands away and see the light.
• The senses cheat you day and night. Vedanta found that out ages ago, modern science is just discovering the same fact.
  
• It will not do merely to listen to great principles. You must apply them in the practical field, turn them into constant practice.
• Of Jnana and Bhakti, he who advocates one and denounces the other cannot be either a Jnanin or a Bhakta, but he is a thief and a cheat.
  
• While real perfection is only one, relative perfections must be many.
• The wind of grace of the Lord is blowing on, for ever and ever. Do you spread your sail.
  
• Practice is absolutely necessary. You may be sit down and listen to me by the hour every day, but if you do not practice, you will not get one step further.
• So long as the 'skin sky' surrounds man, that is, so long as he identifies himself with his body, he cannot see God.
• Men worship Incarnations such as Christ or Buddha. The are the most perfect manifestations of the eternal Self. They are much higher than all the conceptions of God That you or I can make.
  
• The Happiest moments we ever know are when we entirely forget ourselves.
  
• Books cannot teach God, but they can destroy ignorance; their action is negative.
• The monk is the religious expert, having made religion his one metier of life. He is the soldier of God.
  
• I do not believe in a God who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven!
• The first thing to be got rid of by him who would be a Jnani, is fear.
  
• Brahmin, this Reality, is unknown and unknowable, not in the sense of the agnostic, but because to know him would be a blasphemy, because you are He already.