Swami Vivekananda Quotes

• Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve.

You don't have to have a college degree to serve.

You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.

You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

• Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.

  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

• Take the first step in faith.

  You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

• We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

• Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young,
  but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.

• In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies,
  but the silence of our friends.

• History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of
  social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people,
  but the appalling silence of the good people.

• All the powers in the universe are already ours.
  It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.
  Know that there is no darkness around us.
  Take the hands away and there is the light which was from the beginning.
  Darkness never existed, weakness never existed.
  We who are fools cry that we are weak; we who are fools cry that we are impure.

• No bad action goes unchecked with impunity.
  A bath in the holy river Ganges purifies one, but the impurities turn out to
  be more clever than us. Sri Ramakrishna says that the ghosts of lust,
  greed, etc. in persons taking a bath in the Ganges disembark and wait on the
  trees on the bank, to resettle on their shoulders after they have finished
  their holy Ganges-bath! Nothing will be of any help unless we have purified
  our own mind from the dross of ancient fear, medieval hatred and modern greed.