Quotes Upanishads
The Eternal is veiled by the real. The Spirit of life is The Eternal.
Name and form are the real, and by them the Spirit is veiled.
—The Upanishads
The wise should surrender speech in mind, mind in the knowing self, the knowing self in the Spirit of the universe, and the Spirit of the universe in the Spirit of peace.
—The Upanishads
The great sages of the Upanishads teach that by paying close attention to our breath, especially through a steady practice of meditation, we connect with prana. This vital power, in turn, leads our mind into the luminous space of the Self, which is the Heart and essence of our being. “It is said in the Upanishads: ‘I am the Universe.’ If you ask a hundred people as to how they find the world, they are all likely to give different answers. For some, the world is beautiful and the people are good, while for others, the world is extremely bad, and the people are treacherous and sinful. Explore some of Maitri Upanishads best quotations and sayings on Quotes.net - such as 'As one acts and conducts himself, so does he become. The doer of good becomes good. The doer of evil becomes evil. One becomes virtuous by virtuous action, bad by bad action.'
Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.
—The Upanishads
He who knows that as both in one, the knowledge and the ignorance, by the ignorance crosses beyond death and by the knowledge enjoys immortality.
—The Upanishads
The Lord of Love is before and behind. He extends to the right and to the left. He extends above; he extends below. There is no one here but the Lord of Love. He alone is; in truth, he alone is.
—The Upanishads
Life in the world and life in the spirit are not incompatible. Work or action is not contrary to knowledge of God, but indeed, if performed without attachment, is a means to it.
—The Upanishads
He who knows both the transcendent and the immanent, with the immanent overcomes death, and with the transcendent reaches immortality.
—The Upanishads
Where there is joy there is creation. Where there is no joy there is no creation: know the nature of joy.
—The Upanishads
The world is the wheel of God, turning round And round with all living creatures upon its rim. The world is the river of God, Flowing from him and flowing back to him.
—The Upanishads
The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and He dwells within our heart.
—The Upanishads
As a spider emits and draws in its thread, As plants arise on the earth, As the hairs of the head and body from a living person, So from The Eternal arises everything here.
—The Upanishads
Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
—The Upanishads
Whatever is outside this universe is a complete system.This universe itself is also a complete system. Only a complete system can emerge out of a complete system. If a complete system is taken out of a complete system, whatever remains is also a complete system.
—The Upanishads
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one’s mind and one’s subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else.
—The Upanishads
When a person is dying, his voice goes into his mind; his mind into
his breath; his breath into heat; the heat into the highest
divinity. that which is the finest essence – the whole world has
that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman. That art thou.
—The Upanishads
As the sun that beholds the world is untouched by earthly impurities, so the Spirit that is in all things is untouched by external sufferings.
—The Upanishads
He who knows Self as the enjoyer of
The honey from the flowers of the senses,
Ever present within, ruler of time,
Goes beyond fear. For this Self is Supreme!
—The Upanishads
Life comes from the Spirit. Even as a man casts a shadow, so the Spirit casts the shadow of life, and, as a shadow of former lives, a new life comes to this body.
—The Upanishads
Even as a great fish swims along the two banks of a river, first along the eastern bank and then the western bank, in the same way the Spirit of man moves along beside his two dwellings: this waking world and the land of sleep and dreams.
—The Upanishads
Tat Tvam Asi: “That art thou”: Whatever we see or think about, we are That. We are the ultimate Thou and I in all.
—The Upanishads
Sarvam Kalvidam Brahma – “The whole universe is Brahman”: Not only the consciousness in everyone but also the ‘principle of being’ are all Divine. The entire universe is Divine, which includes our Self.
—The Upanishads
The wise see the Lord of Love in the sun, Rising in all its golden radiance To give its warmth and light and life to all.
—The Upanishads
Even as the sun shines and fills all space With light, above, below, across, so shines The Lord of Love and fills the hearts of all created beings.
—The Upanishads
Imperishable is the Lord of Love. As from a blazing fire thousands of sparks Leap forth, so millions of beings arise From the Lord of Love and return to him.
—The Upanishads
Meditation is in truth higher than thought. The earth seems to rest in silent meditation; and the waters and the mountains and the sky and the heavens seem all to be in meditation. Whenever a man attains greatness on this earth, he has his reward according to his meditation.
—The Upanishads
Both the good and the pleasant present themselves to a man. The calm soul examines them well and discriminates. Yeah, he prefers the good to the pleasant; but the fool chooses the pleasant out of greed and avarice.
—The Upanishads
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
—The Upanishads
What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.
—The Upanishads
The wise devote themselves to the welfare of all, for they see themselves in all.
—The Upanishads
It is not the language but the speaker that we want to understand.
—The Upanishads
Topics: Understanding
The Spirit filled all with his radiance.
He is incorporeal and invulnerable, pure and untouched by evil.
He is the supreme seer and thinker, immanent and transcendent.
He placed all things in the path of the Eternal.
—The Upanishads
The Upanishads Pdf
Let a man strive to purify his thoughts. What a man thinketh, that is he; this is the eternal mystery. Dwelling within himself with thoughts serene, he will obtain imperishable happiness. Man becomes that of which he thinks.
—The Upanishads
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In this page we’ll collect Swami Vivekananda‘s quotes and comments on the Upanishads. Related articles and sub-articles are listed at the bottom of the page
- Any attempt to torture the texts of the Upanishads appears to me very ridiculous.[Source]
- Fathers of Calcutta, do you not feel ashamed that such horrible stuff as these Vamachara Tantras, with translations too, should be put into the hands of your boys and girls, and their minds poisoned, and that they should be brought up with the idea that these are the Shastras of the Hindus? If you are ashamed, take them away from your children, and let them read the true Shastras, the Vedas, the Gita, the Upanishads.[Source]
- Go back to your Upanishads — the shining, the strengthening, the bright philosophy — and part from all these mysterious things, all these weakening things.[Source]
- In modern language, the theme of the Upanishads is to find an ultimate unity of things. Knowledge is nothing but finding unity in the midst of diversity. Every science is based upon this; all human knowledge is based upon the finding of unity in the midst of diversity; and if it is the task of small fragments of human knowledge, which we call our sciences, to find unity in the midst of a few different phenomena, the task becomes stupendous when the theme before us is to find unity in the midst of this marvellously diversified universe, where prevail unnumbered differences in name and form, in matter and spirit — each thought differing from every other thought, each form differing from every other form. Yet, to harmonise these many planes and unending Lokas, in the midst of this infinite variety to find unity, is the theme of the Upanishads.[Source]
- In the Upanishads, we see a tremendous departure made. It is declared that these heavens in which men live with the ancestors after death cannot be permanent. Seeing that everything which has name and form must die. If there are heavens with forms, these heavens must vanish in course of time; they may last millions of years, but there must come a time when they will have to go. With this idea came another that these souls must come back to earth, and that heavens are places where they enjoy the results of their good works, and after these effects are finished they come back into this earth life again.[Source]
- Just as the Greek mind or the modern European mind wants to find the solution of life and of all the sacred problems of Being by searching into the external world. So also did our forefathers, and just as the Europeans failed, they failed also. But the Western people never made a move more, they remained there, they failed in the search for the solution of the great problems of life and death in the external world, and there they remained, stranded; our forefathers also found it impossible, but were bolder in declaring the utter helplessness of the senses to find the solution. Nowhere else was the answer better put than in the Upanishad: यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह। — “From whence words come back reflected, together with the mind”; न तत्रचक्षुर्गच्छति न वाग्गच्छति। — “There the eye cannot go, nor can speech reach”. There are various sentences which declare the utter helplessness of the senses, but they did not stop there; they fell back upon the internal nature of man, they went to get the answer from their own soul, they became introspective; they gave up external nature as a failure, as nothing could be done there, as no hope, no answer could be found; they discovered that dull, dead matter would not give them truth, and they fell back upon the shining soul of man, and there the answer was found.[Source]
- तमेवैकं जानथ आत्मानम् अन्या वाचो विमुञ्चथ। — “Know this Atman alone,” they declared, “give up all other vain words, and hear no other.” In the Atman they found the solution — the greatest of all Atmans, the God, the Lord of this universe, His relation to the Atman of man, our duty to Him, and through that our relation to each other. And herein you find the most sublime poetry in the world. No more is the attempt made to paint this Atman in the language of matter. Nay, for it they have given up even all positive language. No more is there any attempt to come to the senses to give them the idea of the infinite, no more is there an external, dull, dead, material, spacious, sensuous infinite, but instead of that comes something which is as fine as even that mentioned in the saying —
न तत्र सूर्यो भाति न चन्द्रतारकं नेमा वेद्युतो भान्ति कुतोऽयमग्निः।
तमेव भान्तमनुभाति सर्वं तस्य भासा सर्वमिदं विभाति॥
What poetry in the world can be more sublime than this! “There the sun cannot illumine, nor the moon, nor the stars, there this flash of lightning cannot illumine; what to speak of this mortal fire!” Such poetry you find nowhere else. Take that most marvellous Upanishad, the Katha. What a wonderful finish, what a most marvellous art displayed in that poem! How wonderfully it opens with that little boy to whom Shraddhâ came, who wanted to see Yama, and how that most marvellous of all teachers, Death himself, teaches him the great lessons of life and death! And what was his quest? To know the secret of death.[Source] - The Jnana Kanda of the Vedas comprises the Upanishads and is known by the name of Vedanta, the pinnacle of the Shrutis, as it is called. Wherever you find the Âchâryas quoting a passage from the Shrutis, it is invariably from the Upanishads. The Vedanta is now the religion of the Hindus. If any sect in India wants to have its ideas established with a firm hold on the people it must base them on the authority of the Vedanta. They all have to do it, whether they are Dvaitists or Advaitists. Even the Vaishnavas have to go to Gopâlatâpini Upanishad to prove the truth of their own theories. If a new sect does not find anything in the Shrutis in confirmation of its ideas, it will go even to the length of manufacturing a new Upanishad, and making it pass current as one of the old original productions. There have been many such in the past.[Source]
- The one fact I found is that in all the Upanishads, they begin with dualistic ideas, with worship and all that, and end with a grand flourish of Advaitic ideas.[Source]
- The Upanishads are the Bible of India. They occupy the same place as the New Testament does. There are [more than] a hundred books comprising the Upanishads, some very small and some big, each a separate treatise. The Upanishads do not reveal the life of any teacher, but simply teach principles. They are [as it were] shorthand notes taken down of discussion in [learned assemblies], generally in the courts of kings. The word Upanishad may mean “sittings” [or “sitting near a teacher”]. Those of you who may have studied some of the Upanishads can understand how they are condensed shorthand sketches. After long discussions had been held, they were taken down, possibly from memory. The difficulty is that you get very little of the background. Only the luminous points are mentioned there. The origin of ancient Sanskrit is 5000 B.C.; the Upanishads [are at least] two thousand years before that. Nobody knows [exactly] how old they are. The Gita takes the ideas of the Upanishads and in [some] cases the very words. They are strung together with the idea of bringing out, in a compact, condensed, and systematic form, the whole subject the Upanishads deal with.[Source]
- The Upanishads are the great mine of strength. Therein lies strength enough to invigorate the whole world; the whole world can be vivified, made strong, energised through them. They will call with trumpet voice upon the weak, the miserable, and the downtrodden of all races, all creeds, and all sects to stand on their feet and be free. Freedom, physical freedom, mental freedom, and spiritual freedom are the watchwords of the Upanishads.[Source]
- The Upanishads teach us all there is of religion.[Source]
- There are one or two more ideas with regard to the Upanishads which I want to bring to your notice, for these are an ocean of knowledge, and to talk about the Upanishads, even for an incompetent person like myself, takes years and not one lecture only. I want, therefore, to bring to your notice one or two points in the study of the Upanishads. In the first place, they are the most wonderful poems in the world. If you read the Samhita portion of the Vedas, you now and then find passages of most marvellous beauty. For instance, the famous Shloka which describes Chaos — तम आसीत्तमसा गूढमगे etc. — “When darkness was hidden in darkness”, so on it goes. One reads and feels the wonderful sublimity of the poetry. Do you mark this that outside of India, and inside also, there have been attempts at painting the sublime. But outside, it has always been the infinite in the muscles the external world, the infinite of matter, or of space. When Milton or Dante, or any other great European poet, either ancient or modern, wants to paint a picture of the infinite, he tries to soar outside, to make you feel the infinite through the muscles. That attempt has been made here also. You find it in the Samhitas, the infinite of extension most marvellously painted and placed before the readers, such as has been done nowhere else.[Source]
- Upanishads have one subject, one task before them — to prove the following theme: “Just as by the knowledge of one lump of clay we have the knowledge of all the clay in the universe, so what is that, knowing which we know everything in the universe?”[Source]
- We now come to the teachings of the Upanishads. Various texts are there. Some are perfectly dualistic, while others are monistic. But there are certain doctrines which are agreed to by all the different sects of India. First, there is the doctrine of Samsâra or reincarnation of the soul. Secondly, they all agree in their psychology; first there is the body, behind that, what they call the Sukshma Sharira, the mind, and behind that even, is the Jiva. That is the great difference between Western and Indian psychology; in the Western psychology the mind is the soul, here it is not. The Antahkarana, the internal instrument, as the mind is called, is only an instrument in the hands of that Jiva, through which the Jiva works on the body or on the external world. Here they all agree, and they all also agree that this Jiva or Atman, Jivatman as it is called by various sects, is eternal, without beginning; and that it is going from birth to birth, until it gets a final release. They all agree in this, and they also all agree in one other most vital point, which alone marks characteristically, most prominently, most vitally, the difference between the Indian and the Western mind, and it is this, that everything is in the soul. There is no inspiration, but properly speaking, expiration. All powers and all purity and all greatness — everything is in the soul. The Yogi would tell you that the Siddhis – Animâ, Laghimâ, and so on — that he wants to attain to are not to be attained, in the proper sense of the word, but are already there in the soul; the work is to make them manifest. Patanjali, for instance, would tell you that even in the lowest worm that crawls under your feet, all the eightfold Yogi’s powers are already existing. The difference has been made by the body. As soon as it gets a better body, the powers will become manifest, but they are there.[Source]
Katha Upanishad
Main article: Swami Vivekananda’s quotes and comments on Katha Upanishad and Nachiketa
Upanishads Quotes About The Heart
- If I get ten or twelve boys with the faith of Nachiketa, I can turn the thoughts and pursuits of this country in a new channel.[Source]
- Om stands for the name of the whole universe, or God. Standing midway between the external world and God, it represents both. But then we can take the universe piecemeal, according to the different senses, as touch, as colour, as taste, and in various other ways. In each case we can make of this universe millions of universes from different standpoints, each of which will be a complete universe by itself, and each one will have a name, and a form, and a thought behind. These thoughts behind are Pratikas. Each of them has a name. These names of sacred symbols are used in Bhakti-Yoga. They have almost infinite power. Simply by repetition of these words we can get anything we desire, we can come to perfection. But two things are necessary. “The teacher must be wonderful, so also must be the taught”, says the Katha Upanishad.[Source]
- The Katha Upanishad says, “That, seeking which a man practices Brahmacharya, I will tell you in short what that is, that is Om. … This is Brahman, the Immutable One, and is the highest; knowing this Immutable One, whatever one desires one gets.”[Source]