Prayer- by Swami Vivekananda

1. By prayer one’s subtle powers are easily roused.

2. What good is it, if we acknowledge in our prayer that God is the Father of us all and in our daily lives does not treat every man as our brother?

3. Prayer and praise are the first means of growth.

4. The feeling of want is the real prayer, not the words. But you must patience to wait and see if your prayers are answered.

5. Despondency is not religion, whatever else it may be by being pleasant always and smiling, it takes you nearer to God, nearer than any prayer.

6. Mother is the first manifestation of power…She is the sum total of the energy in the universe…Established in the idea of mother, we can do anything. She quickly answers prayer.

7. When a man prays to God, ‘Give me this, and give that’, it is not love. How can it be? I offer you a prayer and you give me something in return; that is what it is, mere shop-keeping.

8. Is prayer a magic formula, by repeating which, even if you do not work hard, you gain miraculous results? No. All have to work hard; all have to reach depths of that infinite energy. It is not that one man works hard, and another by repeating a few words achieves results. This universe is a constant prayer. If you take prayer in this sense, I am with you. Words are not necessary. Better is silent prayer.
Read More

Power of Thought - by Swami Vivekananda

1. Doing is very good, but that comes from thinking. Little manifestations of energy through the muscles are called work. But where there is no thought, there will be no work. Fill the brain, therefore, with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

2. Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.

3. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library.

4. It is thought which us the propelling force in us. Fill the mind with the highest thoughts, hear them day after day, and think them month after month. Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without them? It would not be worth having if it were not struggles.

5. The only remedy for bad habits is counter habits; all the bad habits that have left their impressions are to be controlled by good habits. Go on doing good, thinking holy thoughts continuously; that is the only way to suppress base impressions.

6. Always remember that each word, thought, and deed lays up a store for you and that as the bad thoughts and bad works are ready to spring upon you like tigers, so also there is the inspiring hope that the good thoughts and good deeds are ready with the power of a hundred thousand angels to defend you always and for ever.

7. Let positive, strong, helpful thought enter into their (children’s) brains from very childhood.

8. Evil thoughts, looked at materially, are the disease bacilli.

9. The body is made by the thought that lies behind it. The body politic is thus the expression of national thought.

10. If we make ourselves pure and the instruments of good thoughts, these will enter us. The good soul will not be receptive to evil thoughts. evil thoughts find the best field in evil people; they are like microbes which germinate and increase only when they find a suitable soil.

11. Those who are always down-hearted and dispirited in this life can do no work.
Read More