• First of all our young men must be strong. Religion will come afterwards. Be strong, my young friends; that is my advise to you. You will be nearer to heaven through football!, than through the study of Gita.

• Stand up, be bold, be strong. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders and know that you are the creator of your own destiny. All the strength and success you want are within yourselves.

• He works best who works without any motive, neither for money, nor for fame, nor for anything else, and when a man can do that, he will be Buddha, and out of him will come the power to work in such manner as will transform the world.

• Love never fails; my son; today or tomorrow or ages after, truth will conquer! Love shall win victory. Do you love your fellow-men?

• Him I call a “Mahatman” (great soul) whose heart bleeds for the poor, otherwise he is a … (wicked soul).

• Expansion is life, contraction is death. Love is life, and hatred is death.

• To succeed, you must have tremendous perseverance, tremendous will: “I will drink the ocean” says the persevering soul, “at my will mountains will crumble up”. Have that sort of energy, that sort of will, work hard, and you will reach the goal”.

• If you cannot worship your brother man, the manifested God, how can you worship a God who is unmanifested? You may build a temple in which to worship God, and that maybe be good, but a better one, a much higher one, already exists, the human body.

• The life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.

• The remedy of weakness is not brooding over weakness, but thinking of strength. Teach men of the strength that is already within them.

• The position of mother is the highest in the world. The love of God is the only love that is higher than a mother’s love; all others are lower.

• Follow the truth wherever it may lead you; carry ideas to their utmost logical consciousness. Do not be cowardly and hypocritical.

• First learn to obey. The command will come by itself. Always first learn to be a servant and then you will be fit to be a master.

• Purity, patience and perseverance are the three essentials to success and above all love.

• The poor, illiterate, the ignorant, the afflicted … let these be your God. Know that service to these alone is the highest religion.

• Religion and religion alone is the life of India, and when that goes India will die.

• The poor and the miserable are for our salvation, so that we may serve the Lord, coming in the shape of the diseased, coming in the shape of the lunatic, the leper and the sinner!

• So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them!

• I do not care for liberation, I would rather go to a hundred thousand hells doing good to others (silently) like the spring – this is my religion.