Quotes from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself......”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“You may control a mad elephant;
You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger;
Ride the lion and play with the cobra;
By alchemy you may learn your livelihood;
You may wander through the universe incognito;
Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful;
You may walk in water and live in fire;
But control of the mind is better and more difficult.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“You have come to earth to entertain and to be entertained.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man's slavery”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Stillness is the altar of spirit.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Seeds of past karma cannot germinate if they are roasted in the fires of divine wisdom.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Why be elated by material profit?” Father replied. “The one who pursues a goal of evenmindedness is neither jubilant with gain nor depressed by loss. He knows that man arrives penniless in this world, and departs without a single rupee.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The human mind is a spark of the almighty consciousness of God. I could show you that whatever your powerful mind believes very intensely would instantly come to pass.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Man's conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that "existence" depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“TO EVERY THING there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The reflection, the verisimilitude, of life that shines in the fleshly cells from the soul source is the only cause of man's attachment to his body; obviously he would not pay solicitous homage to a clod of clay. A human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man’s slavery.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“He fitted the Vedic definition of a man of God: “Softer than the flower, where kindness is concerned; stronger than the thunder, where principles are at stake.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“If you don’t invite God to be your summer Guest, He won’t come in the winter of your life.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“You go often into the silence, but have you developed anubhava?” He was reminding me to love God more than meditation. “Do not mistake the technique for the Goal.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Moral: Look fear in the face and it will cease to trouble you.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“Hay personas que tratan de ser altas cortando la cabeza a los demàs
Sri Yukteswar”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The ancient rishis discovered these laws of sound alliance between nature and man. Because nature is an objectification of Aum, the Primal Sound or Vibratory Word, man can obtain control over all natural manifestations through the use of certain mantras or chants.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The master never counseled slavish belief. ‘Words are only shells,’ he said. ‘Win conviction of God’s presence through your own joyous contact in meditation.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“A man will be beloved if, possessed with great power, he still does not make himself feared.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindus say, ‘traveling the path of existence through thousands of births’ ... there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge; no wonder that she is able to recollect... what formerly she knew.... For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.”-Emerson.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

“The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, quote from Autobiography of a Yogi

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Popular quotes

“Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie!" He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie.
He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait."
I was already waiting. What else was there to do?
"Here you are," he said. "Look! What's this?"
At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream," he said.
He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I'd seen in Stubbs's eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Phillip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of the countless millennia into half an hour's worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip's musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.
Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasn't I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium - if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more - and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamin's brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. He'd worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The Rotters' Club

“One did not turn down an invitation from Saint Cloud. At least, one didn't if one wanted to continue living contentedly in Paris. Vampires took offense so easily - and Parisian vampires were the worst of all.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from The Runaway Queen

“Before I left, I noticed a shelf that ran above the door. It was just above where he [bin Laden] was standing when we got to the third deck. I slid my hand up and felt two guns, which urned out to be an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol in a holster. I took each weapon down and pulled out the magazine and checked the chamber.
They were both empty.
He hadn't even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings, but didn't even pick up his weapon [...]
Bin Laden knew we were coming when he heard the helicopter. I had more respect for Ahmed al-Kuwaiti in the guesthouse because at least he tried to defend himself and his family. Bin Laden had more time to prepare than the the others, and yet he still didn't do anything. Did he believe his own message? Was he willing to fight the war he asked for? I don't think so. Otherwise, he would have at least gotten his gun and stood up for what he believed. There is no honor in sending people to die for something you won't even fight for yourself.”
― quote from No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden

“Just because you're the same kind doesn't mean you're all one happy family. The important thing is to understand each other. That's love!”
― Sun-mi Hwang, quote from The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

“Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.”
― Alberto Manguel, quote from A History of Reading

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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