Quotes from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit

143 pages

Rating: (10.2K votes)


“The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe.
The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightening and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny. [ Brihadaranyaka IV.4.5 ]”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“He who sees all beings in his Self and his Self in all beings, he never suffers; because when he sees all creatures within his true Self, then jealousy, grief and hatred vanish.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Fire is His head, the sun and moon His eyes, space His ears, the Vedas His speech, the wind His breath, the universe His heart. From His feet the Earth has originated. Verily, He is the inner self of all beings.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit



“Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Human beings cannot live without challenge. We cannot live without meaning. Everything ever achieved we owe to this inexplicable urge to reach beyond our grasp, do the impossible, know the unknown. The Upanishads would say this urge is part of our evolutionary heritage, given to us for the ultimate adventure: to discover for certain who we are, what the universe is, and what is the significance of the brief drama of life and death we play out against the backdrop of eternity.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Place this salt in water and bring it here tomorrow morning".

The boy did.

"Where is that salt?" his father asked?

"I do not see it."

"Sip here. How does it taste?"

"Salty, father."

"And here? And there?"

"I taste salt everywhere."

"It is everywhere, though we see it not. Just so, dear one, the Self is everywhere, within all things, although we see it not. There is nothing that does not come from it. It is the truth; it is the Self supreme. You are that, Shvetaketu.

You Are That.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“There is no joy in the finite; there is joy only in the Infinite.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“He who is rich in the knowledge of the Self does not covet external power or possession.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit



“As long as man is overpowered by the darkness of ignorance, he is the slave of Nature and must accept whatever comes as the fruit of his thoughts and deeds. When he strays into the path of unreality, the Sages declare that he destroys himself; because he who clings to the perishable body and regards it as his true Self must experience death many times.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“The fifth-century Greek writer we know as Dionysius the Areopagite once said that as he grew older and wiser his books got shorter and shorter.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“That which is not comprehended by the mind but by which the mind comprehends—know that...”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Who is better able to know God than I myself, since He resides in my heart and is the very essence of my being? Such should be the attitude of one who is seeking.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“There is enough in the world for everyone’s need; there is not enough for everyone’s greed.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit



“To darkness are they doomed who worship only the body, and to greater darkness they who worship only the spirit.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“As the sun, revealer of all objects to the seer, is not harmed by the sinful eye, nor by the impurities of the objects it gazes on, so the one Self, dwelling in all, is not touched by the evils of the world. (The Upanishads: Breath of the Eternal, pg. 35)”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“The general teaching of the Upanishads is that works alone, even the highest, can bring only temporary happiness and must inevitably bind a man unless through them he gains knowledge of his real Self.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“As a person acts, so he becomes in life. Those who do good become good; those who do harm become bad. Good deeds make one pure; bad deeds make one impure. You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“God is, in truth, the whole universe: what was, what is and what beyond shall ever be. He is the God of life immortal and of all life that lives by food. His hands and feet are everywhere. He has heads and mouths everywhere. He sees all, He hears all. He is in all, and He Is.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit



“The desire for liberation arises in human beings at the end of many births, through the ripening of their past virtuous conduct.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“What exactly is the difference between a dream and waking experience? What happens to the sense of “I” in dreamless sleep? And they sought invariants: in the constantly changing flow of human experience, is there anything that remains the same? In the constantly changing flow of thought, is there an observer who remains the same? Is there any thread of continuity, some level of reality higher than waking, in which these states of mind cohere?”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“The sages would say similarly, “Just for the heaven of it.” Just to reach for the highest. Human beings cannot live without challenge. We cannot live without meaning. Everything ever achieved we owe to this inexplicable urge to reach beyond our grasp, do the impossible, know the unknown. The Upanishads would say this urge is part of our evolutionary heritage, given to us for the ultimate adventure: to discover for certain who we are, what the universe is, and what is the significance of the brief drama of life and death we play out against the backdrop of eternity. In haunting words, the Brihadaranyaka declares: You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“As by knowing one tool of iron, dear one,
We come to know all things made out of iron -
That they differ only in name and form,
While the stuff of which all are made is iron -

So through spiritual wisdom, dear one,
We come to know that all of life is one.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Birth is but the beginning of a trajectory to death; for all their love, parents cannot halt it and in a sense have “given us to death” merely by giving us birth.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit



“materialism leads us to lose awareness of our inner life, which is bad enough; but to be hypnotized by our own feelings and sensations and forget about others and the world around us is worse.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“As by knowing one tool of iron, dear one, we come to know all things made out of iron: that they differ only in name and form, while the stuff of which all are made is iron- so through that spiritual wisdom, dear one, we come to know that ll of life is one.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Only he who has a co-ordinated understanding of both the visible and the invisible, of matter and spirit, of activity and that which is behind activity, conquers Nature and thus overcomes death.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit


“Not everyone who attains Self-realization can make a reliable guide. I have been saying “he,” but this is not a role for men alone. My own teacher is my mother’s mother.”
― quote from The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit



Popular quotes

“[Liam] felt the life, the person he had been, rush past him and out the door as his eyes took in the overturned, splintered remains of their living room. It was a feeling he’d felt only once before, when his father died. But what made it worse…made it permanent, was lying in the middle of the floor, with its contents thrown everywhere. It was his mother’s purse, which had not been there when he left that morning.”
― Cerece Rennie Murphy, quote from Order of the Seers


“Al-Lah alone decides whether we live or die. The rest is vanity.”
― Sherry Jones, quote from The Jewel of Medina


“And tell me, who will be more successful in life? The kid who knows all the chemical formulae or the one who knows teamwork, passion, discipline and focus?”
― Chetan Bhagat, quote from The 3 Mistakes of My Life


“They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.”
― Rob Lowe, quote from Stories I Only Tell My Friends


“the model is not the diagram.”
― quote from Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software


Interesting books

The Thing About the Truth
(9.6K)
The Thing About the...
by Lauren Barnholdt
The Blight of Muirwood
(11.9K)
The Blight of Muirwo...
by Jeff Wheeler
Ancient Light
(2.5K)
Ancient Light
by John Banville
The Pox Party
(12.9K)
The Pox Party
by M.T. Anderson
Empire
(8.8K)
Empire
by Orson Scott Card
The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability
(1.8K)

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.