Chinmayananda > Quotes

“The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.”
― Swami Chinmayananda, Evergreen Messages

“If I rest,I rust”
― Swami Chinmayananda

“Remember, 'Even this will pass away!”
― Swami Chinmayananda, Evergreen Messages

“Happiness, therefore, is measured by the tranquillity of one’s mind.”
― Swami Chinmayananda, Kindle Life

“The more the evil in a man, the less he will respond to sincere and pure love.”
― Swami Chinmayananda, I love You

“We can,We must”
― Swami Chinmayananda

“Until we discover this Spiritual Centre in ourselves, the God in us, we will be confused, miserable, unsatisfied and disturbed, an enigma to ourselves and to others.”
― Swami Chinmayananda, I love You

“Actions are the louder expression of thought. The quality of thought is ordered by the nature of our inner belief and faith.”
― Swami Chinmayananda

“The Geeta is a bouquet composed of the beautiful flowers of spiritual truths collected from the Upanishads.”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, The Holy Geeta

“Achievements are not earned through proficiency alone. They are in fact rewards of our efficiency.

Proficiency is gathered knowledge, while efficiency is the ability to translate the knowledge into action.”
― Swami Chinmayananda

“Whether one’s nature is serving the Lord, either as servant or as wife, such a devotion with no sense of distinction between Lord and yourself that alone is to be achieved.

To move towards this experience of our oneness with the Lord, wherein the Lord and His devotee are not two, is to cultivate the path of a servant to the master or a wife to the husband. Such love is expressed in the glory of sages who have realised this fulfilment of devotion. This alone is to be achieved – prema eva kāryam.”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, Narada Bhakti Sutra

“The secret of action is to get established in equanimity, renouncing all egocentric attachments, and forgetting to worry over our successes and failures”
― Chinmayananda, Inward Journey

“How can the bhakta stand apart from his sorrows?

To a devotee this is much easier than for anyone else. He is one who has already offered all of himself. He has laid at the altar of his Lord his entire being. So totally surrendered becomes his worldly and sacred personality, that not only his physical being but his ideas, his ideals, his worldly duties, even his spiritual duties come to be entirely offered at His feet. His joy is only in going on striving for Him. All worries and anxieties thereafter are His. Then on what account should he ever weep?”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, Narada Bhakti Sutra

“Indeed, certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for the dead; therefore, over the inevitable, you should not grieve.”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, The Holy Geeta

“The quality of activities cannot be raised, unless we raise the very texture of our thoughts and the depth of our understanding.”
― Chinmayananda, Inward Journey

“There is no freedom found either in the outer space, or in the nether kingdom, or on the surface of the earth. It is found only in the mind in which all desires have dried up. When desires are conquered, the march of thoughts cease, and the mind ends. This is the state of freedom.’2”
― Chinmayananda, Ashtavakra Gita

“In the human heart, there is always a great tendency to glorify one's own weaknesses with some convenient angelic name and divine pose.”
― Chinmayananda, The Holy Geeta

“Some act till they meet obstacles, others act in spite of obstacles and conquer them; but some act not, fearing the possibility of some obstacles that might arise enroute.”
― Chinmayananda, Inward Journey

“only”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, Ashtavakra Gita

“YOGA becomes the destroyer of pain for”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, The Holy Geeta

“I am the pure Self, uncontaminated by the layers of matter around me, unattached, ever stainless, I am that all-pervading Brahman.”
― Chinmayananda, Atmabodha

“as sugar made from the sugarcane juice is entirely pervaded by that juice, so the universe, produced in me, is permeated by me, both within and”
― Chinmayananda, Ashtavakra Gita

“Joy Seekers Certainly, every one of you will admit that what we seek in life is peace and joy. The way of seeking and the field in which we are seeking may be different from man to man, from place to place, and from era to era. But all of us are demanding the same joy everywhere and at all times. Joy or peace, as generally understood, is that which we experience when, in the external circumstances, we come to live a pattern which we have demanded for ourselves at a given period of time and place. That which was, in our childhood, a great happiness and joy, may not again provide for us an equal happiness or peace in our youth. A blue glass marble or a tennis ball would have been a joyous present when one was in one’s childhood. But the same present would not bring any happiness to us if it is presented to us at our diamond jubilee; conversely, it may even be painful, inasmuch as it would remind us of our old age and the impending ‘calamitous day’! Examples can be multiplied to justify the working definition of joy or peace that we have made just now. In this, the difficulty or the failure of man is mainly because the demand of the physical man is not necessarily the demand of the emotional; in the same individual the intellectual personality would still have a third type of demand and, perhaps, the spiritual seeker in him would have yet another demand. Thus, four distinct sets of demands are made by each individual at the same period of time and space. Certainly, no two happenings can come to pass at one and the same time and place, the happenings being conditioned by both time and place. Therefore, however much we may try to bring about, through certain new changes, a perfect scheme of things in our life and a hope to gain out of it a perfect satisfaction for all the four personalities in us, we shall only end up with sheer disappointment. Our Hope But, if there be a technique by which we can train, discipline and integrate all these wild and madly revolting personalities in us together into one unit, certainly, we can thereafter order much more freedom and happiness for ourselves in the outer world. These techniques are together termed as ‘religion’ by the great seers.”
― Swami Chinmayananda, Isavasya Upanisad

“The Mahātman who renounces all his desires, activities, attachments, likes and dislikes and his very contact with the life in this ephemeral world of objects, who is ever at the shrine of the Ᾱtman striving with determination to experience the bliss of his own Self, becomes all knowing, all-pervasive Brahman Itself. Having experienced that which has no beginning or end, he becomes immortal. The dreamer, when he ends his dreams and wakes up, becomes the waker himself; the limited ego on transcending the mind-intellect equipment itself becomes the immortal Brahman.”
― Chinmayananda, Atmabodha

“Therefore, mind control, mental development as the modern educationists say, is most important. The student who develops a certain amount of mind control is marked as one who will have the greatest success in life.”
― Chinmayananda, Self Unfoldment

“Perfect morality can be declared and lived up to only by him who has sought to live and discover his real identity with the Self, which is ONE-WITHOUT-A-SECOND, EVERYWHERE, IN ALL BEINGS AND FORMS.”
― Chinmayananda, The Holy Geeta

“न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचि-
न्नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः।
अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो-
न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे॥२०॥”
― Chinmayananda, The Holy Geeta

“This fundamental truth that is very well-known and easily comprehended by all, is in the language of the Geeta a simple statement: “If success you seek, then never strive with a mind dissipated with anxieties and fears about the fruits.” In this connection it is very interesting to dissect carefully and discover exactly what the shastra means when it says; ‘fruits-of-action’. In fact the reward of an action – when we understand it properly – is not anything different from the action itself. An action done in the PRESENT when is conditioned by a FUTURE-time appears as the fruit-of-action. In fact, the action ends or fulfils itself only in its reaction, and the reaction is not anything different from the action.”
― Chinmayananda, The Holy Geeta

“Just as in the dream, the agitated mind creates a delusory dream world and the dreamer identifying himself with it takes it to be real and gains experience thereunder; so too in the waking state, the waker’s mind being agitated, projects itself to a world of delusory plurality and he gains therein his experience of a world, seemingly real for him for the time being.”
― Chinmayananda, Mandukya Upanishad with Gaudapada's Karika: 1

“Since we have started cultivating devotion for the Lord, whose expression is this entire world around us, we will, with extra joy, continue to go to our fields of activity. But of course with a difference; our attitude to our work is now totally transformed. Now that we are constantly thinking of Him and habitually surrendering to our beloved Divine, it becomes easy for us to renounce the anxiety for the enjoyment of the fruits of our actions. We must do our best in whatever field He places us to fulfil our duties. For, as we act we are now recognising the field – nay, the whole world – as the Lord Himself in but another form. All our work becomes our worship of Him, who is the Self in us.”
― Chinmayananda Saraswati, Narada Bhakti Sutra