— Swami Vivekananda, spoken lectures transcribed by listeners, collected in the Complete Works
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सारी शक्ति तुम्हारे भीतर है; तुम कुछ भी और सब कुछ कर सकते हो। इस पर विश्वास करो — यह मत मानो कि तुम कमज़ोर हो, यह मत मानो कि तुम अधपगले हो, जैसा आजकल हममें से अधिकांश मान बैठे हैं।
What it means
Count the clauses: one thing to believe, two things to stop believing. The work being asked for is mostly subtractive. Weakness is treated as an assertion a person keeps actively making, which means the remedy is the withdrawal of a claim rather than the acquisition of strength.
Taken as a prediction about outcomes, you can do anything and everything is not true, and pretending otherwise does the line no favours; it is a claim about where capacity originates, not a guarantee of results. The closing phrase does real work too — as most of us do nowadays makes this a charge against a shared contemporary habit, with the speaker standing inside the indictment rather than above it.
What it teaches you
Track the throwaway sentences you say about yourself for a week — I’m bad at numbers, I could never speak in front of people — because his whole claim is that these are the mechanism and not the description. You need not replace them with affirmations; simply counting how often a limit is being asserted rather than tested is the move being asked for.
अर्थ और सीख
इस कथन में एक बात मानने को कही गई है और दो बातें छोड़ने को — यानी काम जोड़ने का नहीं, हटाने का है। यह नतीजों की गारंटी नहीं देता; इसका अर्थ इतना है कि शक्ति का स्रोत भीतर है, और कमज़ोरी पहले एक मान्यता बनती है, तथ्य बाद में। सीख यह है कि अपने बारे में यूँ ही कही जाने वाली बातों पर — मुझसे नहीं होगा — ध्यान दीजिए, क्योंकि वही सीमा गढ़ती हैं।
Where it comes from
Vivekananda’s central psychological claim, delivered with his characteristic impatience: weakness is a belief before it is ever a fact. The jarring phrase “half-crazy lunatics” is not a slip — he spoke to audiences the way you would shake a friend who had forgotten who they were.
This passage comes from his spoken lectures, transcribed by listeners and gathered 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.
