Daily Inspiration Quote by Swami Sivananda

Swami Sivananda is playing a classic yogic trick on the modern mind: he takes the self-help promise of manifestation ("want it hard enough and it’s yours") and flips it into an indictment of wanting itself. The first sentence is almost bait. Yes, craving can produce results - ambition builds careers, desire attracts lovers, hunger drives invention. But Sivananda’s point is that craving is a bad manager of the soul: it keeps you dependent, tense, and perpetually negotiating with the future. You may get the thing, but you also get the leash.

The second line delivers the real teaching: renunciation isn’t a hair-shirt moralism, it’s a strategy for reclaiming agency. In the Indian spiritual context Sivananda writes from, craving (tanha/kama) is not just preference; it’s attachment, the sticky mental habit that turns objects into identity. "Renounce" here doesn’t mean never owning anything. It means removing the desperation - the inner narrative that says, If I have that, I’ll be whole.

The subtext is almost psychological: desire warps perception. When you stop gripping, you see opportunities more clearly, act with less fear, and become harder to manipulate. The "object will follow" isn’t magic so much as a description of how equanimity changes outcomes: people trust the unneedy, decisions improve without panic, and the world stops feeling like a scoreboard. The paradox works because it insults the ego’s favorite fantasy - control - and replaces it with a quieter power: non-attachment as leverage.