Anirban Chatterjee 's Key Ideas from The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
by Swami Vivekananda

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

It is thought which is 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 for struggles.

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.

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 forever.

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

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

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

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.

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