You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself

I’m not sure what or who god is but this quote is less about god and more about what you think about yourself. Swami Vivekananda’s quotes talk about the importance of self-belief, confidence and trusting oneself before thinking about the sacred realm. In this quote, the inspiration is to find ourselves and trust in our thoughts, emotions and inner power. Unless we find a pathway to do this, the conversations about god and spirituality are pointless.

Some of the salient points in this quote are:

Self-belief is sacred and pure
What you believe about yourself, the world believes about you
You project your thoughts – unless you believe, you can’t convince anyone else

You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself
Swami Vivekananda

According to this quote – your self-belief is everything. If you don’t believe in yourself, then how can anyone trust something else that you believe in? We are supposed to know ourselves intimately. We are the best people to know about our thoughts, values, aspirations and the fundamental bare truth about ourselves. We always have a mask in front of the society because it isn’t easy to be ourselves. But internally, we know who we are. However, if we are afraid to believe in this internal voice, then why should anyone else trust us? (8 Steps to Stop Doubting Yourself,lead with confidence)

This quote is asking us to focus internally on our beliefs and thoughts. Do we truly believe in them? Is the belief strong enough to be a conviction? Unless we establish this level of belief and trust in our thoughts – anything else we say about god or something external is a lie. If we can’t believe in ourselves – something that we know so well – what place do our beliefs on other things have? This belief is as strong as a sacred thought. We will be able to find god or any other belief/conviction as appropriate. But it starts with making sure that we believe in ourselves. Once we do that, we at least have a chance of convincing others.