Sri Sathya Sai Baba Quotes on Service - Seva
Sai Baba Quotes
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Service expresses the divinity hidden in man. It broadens one's heart, it destroys narrow-mindedness, and it gives delight. The evil qualities and tendencies in us can be driven away through service.

To remove the evil of egoism, service is the most efficient instrument.

Service is the highest spiritual discipline. Prayer and meditation, or knowledge of scripture and Vedanta (holy scriptures of India), cannot help you reach the goal as quickly as service can. Service has a double effect: it extinguishes the ego and gives bliss.

The joy one gets while promoting another's joy is incomparable.

Service is the first step along the spiritual path.

If you lift the hand to serve, to help, to console, to encourage another man, you are lifting it for God, for God is in every man.

How can anyone contemplate on God - who loves the poor and the grief-stricken - and yet be cold-hearted when the poor and the grief-stricken are around them?

Hands that serve are holier than lips that pray.

You have no reason to feel proud when you are able to help another, for your skill or wealth or strength or courage or official position that gave you the chance to serve was the gift of God, whether you recognize it or not. You are only offering this God's gift to another God's gift, namely the poor, the illiterate, the weak, the diseased, the grieving, the broken-hearted, who seek your help.

Man has become so selfish that he does not care for others, or anything other than his own welfare . . . One who constantly thinks of his own body, his own family, his own wealth and his own comfort is truly a selfish man. The only way to cleanse such a hard-hearted man is through service to humanity.

God is the embodiment of compassion. He watches for a grain of goodness or humility so that He can reward it with tons of grace. Deserve the grace of God by helping the weak and the poor, the diseased and the downtrodden.

Constant work in loving service to others covers the seeds of past sinful and harmful actions, so that they die away and do not grow into a new round of misery.

Service without ideal of self . . . trains you to transcend all the artificial distinctions imposed by history and geography, and to realize that the human community is one and indivisible.

A wave of service, if it sweeps over the land catching everyone in its enthusiasm, will be able to wipe off the mounds of hatred, malice and greed that infest the world.

Do not believe that you can by means of service reform or reshape the world. You may or may not; that does not matter. The real value of service, its most visible result, is that it reforms you, reshapes you. Do service as a spiritual discipline; then you will be humble and happy.

Through service rendered without any desire to placate one's ego, with only the well-being of others in view, it is possible to cleanse the consciousness and have the atma (true inner self that is divine) revealed.