Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.
Interpretation
Encourage positive thoughts from a young age to build a strong mindset.
This quote emphasizes the importance of nurturing positive and empowering thoughts from childhood. Swami Vivekananda suggests that by being open to uplifting ideas, individuals can develop resilience and strength, while avoiding negative and debilitating thoughts that can hinder personal growth and success.
In practice
In a motivational speech to young students about the power of positive thinking.
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 major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.
Iβm young, Iβm handsome, Iβm fast, Iβm pretty, and canβt possibly be beat. They must fall in the round I call.
If you start something, you shouldn't quit; that is what we were taught. If you're going to play, you might as well play to be your best.
A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.