Daily Inspiration Quote by Swami Sivananda

Desire gets treated here less like a human feeling and more like a contaminant: a substance that spreads, stains, and quietly reorganizes the whole inner economy. Sivananda’s blunt repetition ("Desire is... Desire is...") isn’t poetry for its own sake; it’s a drill. The cadence mimics mantra, but the content is a kind of anti-mantra, meant to interrupt the listener’s reflex to romanticize wanting as ambition, romance, or “motivation.” He’s trying to retrain perception: to see craving not as personality, but as pathology.

The most interesting move is the pivot: “Desire is the motive force for action.” That line concedes what modern life treats as obvious - wanting makes things happen. Then he yanks the rug out. If desire powers action, the spiritual project can’t just be moral behavior; it has to be surgery at the source. The subtext is severe: even good deeds are suspect if they’re fueled by egoic hunger (recognition, security, control, pleasure). Purity, in this framework, isn’t prudishness; it’s freedom from being pushed around by inner lack.

Calling desire “poverty” is the psychological tell. Desire is framed as a mindset of insufficiency: the self as a deficit that the world must fill. That fits the broader yoga-vedanta context Sivananda worked in, where liberation is less about acquiring virtue than dissolving the restless “I want” that keeps consciousness tethered to suffering. “Even a spark” escalates the stakes: he’s not offering moderation. He’s describing a regime of vigilance, because the smallest craving can rebuild the whole prison.