Prema Nandakumar > Quotes

“By being the servant of all, a Hindu seeks to uplift himself. That is how the Hindus should uplift the masses, and not by looking for any foreign influence.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“As for us Vedantins and Sannyasins, we are proud of our Sanskrit-speaking ancestors of the Vedas; proud of our Tamil-speaking ancestors whose civilization is the oldest yet known; we are proud of our Kolarian ancestors older than either of the above—who lived and hunted in forests; we are proud of our ancestors with flint implements—the first of the human race; and if evolution is true, we are proud of our animal ancestors, for they antedated man himself. We are proud that we are descendants of the whole universe, sentient or insentient. Proud that we are born, and work, and suffer—prouder sill that we die when the task is finished and enter forever the realm where there is no more delusion.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“Unless women were educated and infused with self-confidence, it would be idle to think of a bright future for the nation.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“When I was a boy, I read Milton’s Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that soul that never weakens, faces everything, and determines to die game. Stand up and die game! Do not add one lunacy to another. Do not add your weakness to the evil that is going to come. That is all I have to say to the world.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“My child, what does it matter, if you are in the right? Always follow the truth without caring about the result. Very often you may have to suffer injustice or unpleasant consequences for holding to the truth; but you must not, under any circumstances, abandon it.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“Before flooding India with socialistic or political ideas, first deluge the land with spiritual ideas. The first work that demands out attention is that the most wonderful truths confined in our Upanishads, in our scriptures, in our Puranas must be brought out from the books, brought out from the monasteries, brought out from the forests, brought out from the possession of selected bodies of people, and scattered broadcast all over the land, so that these truths may run like fire all over the country from north to south and east to west.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“It was the preachers who wished to poach upon other religious fields that angered him.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda

“There is danger ahead as well as glory; for revival sometimes breeds fanaticism, sometimes goes to the extreme, so that often it is not even in the power of those who start the revival to control it when it has gone beyond a certain length. It is better, therefore, to be forewarned. We have to find our way between the Scylla of old superstitious orthodoxy and the Charybdis of materialism—of Europeanism, of soullessness, of the so-called reform—which has penetrated to the foundation of Western progress.”
― Prema Nandakumar, Swami Vivekananda