All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore make your own future. "Let the dead past bury its dead." The infinite future is before you.
Perfect sincerity, holiness, gigantic intellect, and all-conquering will. Let only a handful of men work with these, and the whole world will be revolutionized.
We must plunge heart and soul and body into the work. And until we are ready to sacrifice everything else to one Idea and to one alone, we never, never will see the Light.
Each one of us pray, day and night, for the downtrodden millions in India, who are held fast by poverty, priest craft, and tyranny - pray day and night for them. I am no meta physician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor, I love the poor.... Let these people be your God - think of them, work for them, pray for them incessantly - the Lord will show you the way.
The more opposition there is, the better. Does a river acquire velocity unless there is resistance? The newer and better a thing is, the more opposition I will meet with at the outset. It is opposition which foretells success. Where there is no opposition there is no success either.
No authority can save us, no beliefs. If there is a God, all can find Him. No one needs to be told it is warm; all can discover it for themselves. So it should be with God. He should be a fact in the consciousness of every person.
Realize your true nature. That is all there is to do. Know yourself as you are - infinite Spirit. That is practical religion. Everything else is impractical, for everything else will perish.
Pleasure is not the goal of man, but knowledge. Pleasure and happiness comes to an end. It is a mistake to suppose that pleasure is the goal. The cause of all the miseries we have in the world is that men foolishly think pleasure to be the ideal to strive for. After a time man finds that it is not happiness, but knowledge, towards which he is going, and that both pleasure and pain are great teachers.
No one is ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion, which arouses the internal teacher, who helps us to understand things.
Every idea has to become broad till it covers the whole of this world, every aspiration must go on increasing till it has engulfed the whole of humanity, nay, the whole of life, within its scope.