Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Each nation has a main current in life; in India it is religion. Make it strong and the waters on either side must move along with it.
Interpretation
The essence of a nation's identity is often defined by its core values or beliefs; for India, that is religion.
Swami Vivekananda emphasizes that every nation is guided by a primary principle that shapes its culture and society. In the case of India, he identifies religion as this guiding force, suggesting that when religion is strong and influential, all other aspects of life and society will align and flow in harmony with it, similar to how water moves in relation to a strong current.
In practice
In a speech about the cultural identity of nations.
Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented before us by the great sage Valmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster, none more beautiful, and at the same time simpler, than the language in which the great poet has depicted the life of Rama.
Hinduism threw away Buddhism after taking its sap. The attempt of all the Southern Acharyas was to effect a reconciliation between the two. Shankaracharya's teaching shows the influence of Buddhism. His disciples perverted his teaching and carried it to such an extreme point that some of the later reformers were right in calling the Acharya's followers "crypto-buddhists".
According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already.
I have come to deal with principles. I have only to preach that God comes again and again, and that He came in India as Krishna, Rama, and Buddha, and that He will come again. It can almost be demonstrated that after each 500 years the world sinks, and a tremendous spiritual wave comes, and on the top of the wave is a Christ.
Salvation means knowing the truth. We do not become anything; we are what we are. Salvation [comes] by faith and not by work. It is a question of knowledge! You must know what you are, and it is done. The dream vanishes. This you [and others] are dreaming here. When they die, they go to [the] heaven [of their dream]. They live in that dream, and [when it ends], they take a nice body [here], and they are good people.
The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.
A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.
Thirty spokes meet in the hub,_x000D_ _x000D_ but the empty space between them_x000D_ _x000D_ is the essence of the wheel._x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Pots are formed from clay,_x000D_ _x000D_ but the empty space within it_x000D_ _x000D_ is the essence of the pot._x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Walls with windows and doors_x000D_ _x000D_ form the house,_x000D_ _x000D_ but the empty space within it_x000D_ _x000D_ is the essence of the home.
They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
History is at once freedom and necessity.
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