Freedom is the goal. …it is freedom alone that is desirable. That is what men struggle after.
– Swami Vivekananda.

One may gain political and social independence, but if one is slave to his passions and desires, one can not feel pure joy of real freedom.
– Swami Vivekananda.

The first manifest effect of life is expansion. You must expand if you want to live. The moment you have ceased to expand, death is upon you, danger is ahead…Mark my words, it has got to come if this nation lives at all. This question, therefore, is the greatest of the signs of the revival of national life, and through this expansion…our contribution to the general upheaval of the world, is going out to the external world.
– Swami Vivekananda.

Every man should take up his own ideal and endeavour to accomplish it. That is a surer way of progress than taking up other men’s ideals which he can never hope to accomplish.
– Swami Vivekananda.

It is not when a man becomes free, he will stop and become a dead lump; but he will be more active than any other being, because every other being acts only under compulsion, he alone through freedom.
– Swami Vivekananda.

No one was ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion which rouses the internal teacher to work to understand things.
– Swami Vivekananda.

The highest ideal is eternal and entire self-abnegation, where there is no ‘I’, but all is ‘Thou’.
– Swami Vivekananda.

Aye, who ever saw money make the man ? It is man that always makes money. The whole world has been made by the energy of man, by the power of enthusiasm, by the power of faith.
– Swami Vivekananda.

The man who wants money is striving for freedom to get rid of the bondage of poverty. Every action of man is worship, because the idea is to attain to freedom, and all action, directly or indirectly, tends to that.
– Swami Vivekananda.

Make way for the life-current of the nation. Take away the blocks that bar the way to the progress of this mighty river, cleanse its path, clear the channel, and out it will rush by its own natural impulse, and the nation will go on careering and progressing.
– Swami Vivekananda.