— Swami Vivekananda, addresses on religious harmony, Complete Works; compressed form of Chicago 1893
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सत्य को हज़ार तरीकों से कहा जा सकता है, और उनमें से हर एक सच हो सकता है।
What it means
The claim sits at the level of statement, not of truth. One truth, many statements of it — which means the difference between two formulations is not by itself evidence that one of them is wrong. That is a narrow, defensible point, and it is the whole point.
Read the verb carefully: each one can be true, not each one is. The sentence licenses nothing automatically; it only removes unfamiliar phrasing as grounds for dismissal. The work of checking whether a given statement is one of the thousand still has to be done, and this line does not do it for you.
What it teaches you
When someone states something in an idiom you do not use — a different religious vocabulary, a different discipline’s jargon — separate two questions before replying: is the claim different, or only the wording? Most arguments that feel deep are the second kind, and they dissolve the moment either side restates the other’s position in their own words. Try that restatement first; if the disagreement survives it, it is real and worth having.
अर्थ और सीख
बात सत्य के बारे में नहीं, सत्य को कहने के तरीक़ों के बारे में है: एक ही सच अलग-अलग भाषाओं और मुहावरों में कहा जा सकता है, और अलग शब्द होना ही ग़लत होने का सबूत नहीं। ध्यान दें कि वाक्य कहता है हर कथन सच हो सकता है, यह नहीं कि हर कथन सच है। सीख यह है कि किसी से बहस से पहले देख लें कि मतभेद असल में दावे का है या सिर्फ़ शब्दों का।
Where it comes from
The sentence that made him famous in Chicago in 1893, in compressed form. It is not the weak claim that all religions are the same, nor the lazy one that truth does not matter — it is that a single truth survives translation into many idioms, each of them genuinely true in its own.
From his addresses on religious harmony in the Complete Works. Swami Vivekananda’s lectures and letters are collected in the nine-volume Complete Works, which is fully searchable — so his sayings can be checked, and we flag the ones that cannot.
