Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth.

. . . it is difficult for Europeans to appreciate the sentiment. Other nations kill animals by wholesale and kill one another; they exist in a sea of blood. A European said that the reason why in India animals were not killed was because it was supposed that they contained the spirits of ancestors. This reason was worthy of a savage nation who are not many steps from the brute.

We believe that every being is divine, is God. Every soul is a sun covered over with clouds of ignorance; the difference between soul and soul is owing to the difference in density of these layers of clouds.

My Master used to say, when a pitcher is being filled (by immersion), it gurgles, but when full, it is noiseless.

Work and worship are necessary to take away the veil, to lift off the bondage and illusion.

The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

We do not progress from error to truth, but from truth to truth