The Gita is a gate opening on the whole world of spiritual truth and experience; and the view it gives us embraces all the provinces of that supreme region.
—Sri Aurobindo

   When disappointment stares me in the face and all alone I see not one ray of light, I go back to the Bhagavad Gita. I find a verse here and a verse there, and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming tragedies—and my life has been full of external tragedies. If they have left no visible, no indelible scar on me, I owe it all to the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita.
—Mahatma Gandhi

     The Gita teaching applies to every level of spiritual seeker. Therefore, it may be described as the heart of Vedanta—its very essence… The Gita is the support of all earnest seekers and aspirants. The Gita allows them to swim and survive in this sea of worldly life. The Gita helps them to traverse all obstacles and reach their goal.
     Whatever the feelings of a person, the meaning he will derive from the Gita will be commensurate with his level of spiritual development…The Gita yields different meanings to different types of people. Based upon the state of your feelings, each of you will get the meaning which is appropriate to the stage you have reached on the spiritual path…
     There is plenty of water in the ocean, but the water you can take away from its shores depends upon the capacity of the vessel that you have brought. The water will be the same: the difference will only be in the size of the vessel. Likewise, there may be differences in your feelings, but the Bhagavad Gita is only one. Its basic nature is the same for all. Its sacred purpose is to transform humanity into divinity.
—Sri Sathya Sai Baba

     Sense control is something like the wick in the lamp of your heart. Merely having the wick of sense control is not enough. You must also have the oil, which is the fuel for the lamp: that is your devotion. And there must be a container, which holds this oil: that is your detachment. If you have the container, the oil and the wick, you’ll be able to light the lamp easily. Still, someone has to come and light it. That someone is God. Once you have detachment, devotion and sense control, then God will come and light the lamp in your heart. In the case of Arjuna, it was Krishna who performed this sacred act of lighting the lamp and revealing the splendor of the Atma jyoti—the flame of Self—in Arjuna’s heart.
—Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Action(Karma)

Moksha(liberation) is not freedom from action but freedom in action.
—Swami Chinmayananda

—photo by Joy Von Tiedermann

      The secret of action is to become established in equanimity, renouncing all egocentric attachments, and forgetting to worry about our successes and failures.
—Swami Chinmayananda

      True action does not displace; it transforms. A change of heart is action. Activity is not action. Action is hidden, unknown, unknowable. You can only know the fruit.
—Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj

      Do what you believe in and believe in what you do. All else is a waste of energy and time.
—Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj

      As he acts and as he behaves, so he becomes.
—Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

      Engaging himself in the battle for evolution and inward mastery, a meditator steadily grows out of the shadowy regions of his own spiritual ignorance and imperfections, to smile forth in luxurious extravagance into the sparkling sunshine of Knowledge. When the meditator keeps his mind undisturbed in the roaring silence within, in the white heat of meditation his mind gets purified, like a piece of iron in the smithy furnace… Krishna is trying to make an agitated, restless, inquisitive intellect understand that positive and dynamic Reality—which can and will be gained, when the mind and intellect are transcended.
—Swami Chinmayananda