1st August 2023- Numbers do not count, nor does wealth or poverty; a handful of people can throw the world off its hinges, provided they are united in thought, word, and deed–never forget this.
2nd August 2023- I make no distinction between householder and sannyasin in this matter: for all time my head shall bend low in reverence wherever I see greatness, broadness of heart, and holiness– Shantih! Shantih! Shantih!
3rd August 2023- Freedom with only one meal a day and tattered rags on is a million times better than slavery in gold chains.
4th August 2023- Like fire in a piece of flint, knowledge exists in the mind. Suggestion is the friction which brings it out. So with all our feelings and actions–our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames–everyone of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together are called karma–work, action.
7th August 2023- Where the sacred relation between teacher and taught is not maintained, spirituality is almost an unknown quantity. There is no one to transmit and no one to be transmitted to, because they are all independent. Of whom can they learn? And if they come to learn, they come to buy learning. Give me a dollar’s worth of religion; cannot I pay a dollar for it? Religion cannot be got that way!
9th August 2023- The first group of religious ideas starts with the idea of God. Here is the universe, and this universe is created by a certain Being. Everything that is in this universe has been created by Him. Along with that, at a later stage, comes the idea of soul-that there is this body, and something inside this body which is not the body. This is the most primitive idea of religion that we know. We can find a few followers of that in India, but it was given up very early.
10th August 2023- “I am the essence of bliss.” Follow no ideal, you are all there is. Fear naught, you are the essence of existence. Be at peace. Do not disturb yourself. You never were in bondage, you never were virtuous or sinful. Get rid of all these delusions and be at peace. Whom to worship? Who worships? All is the Atman. To speak, to think is superstition. Repeat over and over, “I am Atman,” “I am Atman.” Let everything else go.
11th August 2023- Let the world say what it chooses, I shall tread the path of duty–know this to be the line of action for a hero. Otherwise, if one has to attend day and night to what this man says or that man writes, no great work can be achieved in this world.
14th August 2023- I have no partiality for any party in the caste question, because I know it is a social law and is based on diversity of Guna and Karma. It also means grave harm if one bent on going beyond Guna and Karma cherishes in mind any caste distinctions. In these matters, I have got some settled ideas through the grace of my Guru.
15th August 2023- Every mental and physical blow that is given to the soul, by which, as it were, fire is struck from it, and by which its own power and knowledge are discovered, is karma, this word being used in its widest sense. Thus we are all doing karma all the time. I am talking to you: that is karma. You are listening: that is karma. We breathe: that is karma. We walk: karma. Everything we do, physical or mental, is karma, and it leaves its mark on us.
16th August 2023- The finding of unity in variety is really what we call knowledge.
17th August 2023- There is nothing higher and holier than the knowledge which comes to the soul transmitted by a spiritual teacher. If a man has become a perfect yogi, it comes by itself, but it cannot be got in books. You may go and knock your head against the four corners of the world, seek in the Himalayas, the Alps, the Caucasus, the Desert of Gobi or Sahara, or the bottom of the sea, but it will not come until you find a teacher.
21st August 2023- My idea is to remain in Kashi for some time, and to watch how Viswanath and Annapurna deal it out to my lot. And my resolve is something like “either to lay down my life or realize my ideal”– so help me the Lord of Kashi.
22nd August 2023- We sometimes indicate a thing by describing its surroundings. When we say Sat-chid-ananda (“Existence-Knowledge-Bliss”), we are merely indicating the shores of an indescribable Beyond. We cannot say anything about it, for that too is relative. Any imagination, any concept, is in vain. Neti, neti (“Not this, not this”) is all that can be said, for even to think is to limit and so to lose.
23rd August 2023- If we really want to judge the character of others, look not at their great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch people do their most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you their real character. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but they alone are really great whose character is great always, the same wherever they be.
24th August 2023- Let people praise you or blame you, let fortune smile or frown upon you, let your body fall today or after a yuga, see that you do not deviate from the path of Truth. How much of tempest and waves one has to weather before one reaches the haven of Peace!
28th August 2023- Find the teacher, serve him as a child, open your heart to his influence, see in him God manifested. Our attention should be fixed on the teacher as the highest manifestation of God; and as the power of attention concentrates there, the picture of the teacher as a human being will melt away; the frame will vanish, and the real God will be left there.
29th August 2023- Those who are faint-hearted and cowardly sink their barks near the shore, frightened by the raging of waves on the sea. He who is a hero never casts a glance at these. Come what may, I must attain my ideal first–this is firm determination; without it, no amount of divine help will be of any avail to banish your inertia.
30th August 2023- Every one of us is, as it were, a center and is attracting all the powers of the universe towards ourselves, and in this center we are fusing them all and again sending them off in a big current. Such a center is the real person–the almighty, the omniscient–who draws the whole universe. Good and bad, misery and happiness, all are running toward us and clinging round us, and out of them we fashion the mighty stream of tendency called character and throw it outwards. And we have the power of drawing in anything, so have we the power of throwing it out.
31st August 2023- Out of what has all this been produced? Apart from the question of the efficient cause, or God, apart from the question that God created the universe, the great question of all questions is: Out of what did God create it? All the philosophies are turning, as it were, on this question.