Swami Vivekananda is generally known as a saint, a patriot, and a lover of humanity. But very few people know him as a poet. He also wrote some poems, songs, and hymns, which though few in number, may be classed with the creations of poetic art. This book is an exhaustive collection of those compositions by him, consisting of those written in English, and others translated into English from the original Bengali, Sanskrit, or Hindi.
Those who die, merely suffering the woes of life like cats and dogs, are they human beings? The worthy are those who, even when agitated by the sharp interaction of pleasure and pain, are discriminating and, knowing them to be of an evanescent nature, become passionately devoted to the Atman. This is all the difference between human beings and animals.
-Swami Vivekananda