Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta, met the mystic Ramakrishna as a questioning young man, and after years wandering India as a monk stood up at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and became, in an afternoon, the best-known Indian voice in the West. He died at thirty-nine, having founded the Ramakrishna Mission and preached what he called practical Vedanta: that divinity is already inside every person, that strength is the test of any religion worth having, and that service to others is worship. His lectures and letters fill the nine volumes of the Complete Works, which is why his sayings can be checked — and why we mark clearly the ones circulating under his name that appear nowhere in them, including a famous line that actually belongs to Steve Jobs.