Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Woman has suffered for eons, and that has given her infinite patience and infinite perseverance.
Interpretation
The struggles of women throughout history have endowed them with immense patience and resilience.
This quote emphasizes the enduring strength of women, shaped by their historical experiences of suffering and hardship. Swami Vivekananda suggests that the challenges faced by women have not only fostered patience but also a remarkable power of perseverance, highlighting their ability to overcome adversities with grace and fortitude.
In practice
During a women's empowerment event, to illustrate the resilience of women.
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.
Whatever authority I may have rests solely on knowing how little I know.
I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life.
Hard work and humility are essential for spiritual sadhana.
Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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