Swami Vivekananda's Quotes On Emotions ~ Swami Vivekananda Quotes

God is the one goal of all our passions and emotions.
If you want to be angry, be angry with Him.
Chide your Beloved, chide your Friend.
Whom else can you safely chide?

—Swami Vivekananda

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

In this article we'll find a collection of Swami Vivekananda's quotes on emotions.

During meditation, suppress the emotional side altogether.^[Source]
Emotional natures do not care for abstract definitions of the truth.^[Source]
Emotional natures like mine are always preyed upon by relatives and friends. This world is merciless.^[Source]
Emotions have more connection with the senses than with the faculty of reason; and, therefore, when principles are entirely lost sight of and emotions prevail, religions degenerate into fanaticism and sectarianism.^[Source]
Emotions many times drag us down to the level of animals.^[Source]
God is the one goal of all our passions and emotions. If you want to be angry, be angry with Him. Chide your Beloved, chide your Friend. Whom else can you safely chide? Mortal man will not patiently put up with your anger; there will be a reaction. If you are angry with me I am sure quickly to react, because I cannot patiently put up with your anger. Say unto the Beloved, "Why do You not come to me; why do You leave me thus alone?" Where is there any enjoyment but in Him? What enjoyment can there be in little clods of earth? It is the crystallised essence of infinite enjoyment that we have to seek, and that is in God. Let all our passions and emotions go up unto Him.^[Source]
Holy men who have experienced these extreme emotions have been called epileptic.^[Source]
In Bhakti-Yoga the central secret is, therefore, to know that the various passions and feelings and emotions in the human heart are not wrong in themselves; only they have to be carefully controlled and given a higher and higher direction, until they attain the very highest condition of excellence.^[Source]
In deep emotional excitement the soul tries to stand upon itself.^[Source]
The emotion may arise from anything external, there is concentration of mind.^[Source]
The nearer we are to [beasts and] birds, the more we are in the hells of emotion. We call it love. It is self-hypnotisation. We are under the control of our [emotions] like animals. A cow can sacrifice its life for its young. Every animal can. What of that? It is not the blind, birdlike emotion that leads to perfection. ... [To reach] the eternal consciousness, that is the goal of man! There emotion has no place, nor sentimentalism, nor anything that belongs to the senses — only the light of pure reason. [There] man stands as spirit.^[Source]
The persons appeal to our emotions; and the principles, to something higher, to our calm judgement.^[Source]
The stronger the will, the less the yielding to the sway of the emotions.^[Source]
There is the emotional man who loves the sublime and the beautiful to an excessive degree. He loves to think of the beautiful, to enjoy the aesthetic side of nature, and adore Love and the God of Love. He loves with his whole heart the great souls of all times, the prophets of religions, and the Incarnations of God on earth; he does not care whether reason can or cannot prove that Christ or Buddha existed; he does not care for the exact date when the Sermon on the Mount was preached, or for the exact moment of Krishna's birth; what he cares for is their personalities, their lovable figures. Such is his ideal.^[Source]
There is then the Bhakti-Yoga for the man of emotional nature, the lover. He wants to love God, he relies upon and uses all sorts of rituals, flowers, incense, beautiful buildings, forms and all such things. Do you mean to say they are wrong?^[Source]
We know it is not emotion alone that governs the world, but there is something behind emotion. Economic causes, surrounding circumstances and other considerations enter into the development of nations.^[Source]
Where is the beginning of this emotionalism that has got hold of you? It is in the senses. "It is the touch of the senses that brings all this quality of existence: heat and cold, pleasure and pain. They come and go."^[Source]
Wherever there are sensations, ideas, emotions, there must be words.^[Source]