Swami Vivekananda

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3.

 

21. Unity is knowledge, diversity is ignorance. This knowledge is

your birthright .... There never were different religious in the

world. We are all destined to have salvation, whether we will it or

not. You have to attain it in the long run and become free, because

it is your nature to be free.

 

22. Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or

temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of

his spiritual childgood: but on and on he must progress.

 

23. Renunciation, that is the flag, the banner of India, floating

over the world, the one undying thought which India sends again and

again as a warning to dying races, as a warning to all tyranny, as a

warning to wickedness in the wrold. Ay, Hindus, let not your hold of

that banner go. H old it aloft. Even if you are weak and cannot

renounce, do not lower the ideal.

 

24. With five hundren men .... the conquest of India might take

fifty years: with as many women, not more than a few weeks.

 

25. .... Make way for the life-current of the nation. Take away the

blocks that bar the way to the progress of this mighty river,

cleanse its path, clear the channel, and out it will rush by its own

natural impulse, and the national will go on careering and

progressing.

 

26. The man who wants money is striving for freedom -- to get rid of

the bondage of poverty. Every action of man is worship, because the

idea is to attain to freedom, and all action, directly or

indirectly, tends to that.

 

27. Aye, who ever saw money make the man? It is man that always

makes money. The whole world has been made by the energy of man, by

the power of enthusiasm, by the power of faith.

 

28. No one was ever really taught by another; each of us has to

teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion which

rouses the internal teacher to work to understand things.

 

29. The highest ideal is eternal and entire self-abnegation, where

there is no 'I', but all is 'Thou'.

 

30. It is not that when a man becomes free, he will stop and become

a dead lump; but he will be more active than any other being,

because every other being acts only under compulsion, he alone

through freedom.

 

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