“In reply to a question ‘What did Sri Ramakrishna mean when he said that he who would come to him would not be born again?’
First, devotees do not bother about this question whether this is the first, second, or third birth. A good devotee is only concerned with the question of how he can love God, how he can have true devotion to God, how he be pure at heart. This is all that worries him. He also completely surrenders to the will of God. Life or death makes no difference to him. He thinks what God wills must happen.
Second, this is what I understand by the coming of the devotee to Sri Ramakrishna in his last birth: He who believes with all his heart and soul that Sri Ramakrishna is an Incarnation of God will come to him, and he alone will not be born again.”
(p.157-8, Letters For Spiritual Seekers, Sami Turiyananda’s letter dt. 5th September 1919)
The only sign of life is going outward and forward and expansion. Contraction is death. Why should you do good to others? Because that is the only condition of life; thereby you expand beyond your little Self; you live and grow. All narrowness, all contraction, all selfishness is simply slow suicide, and when a nation commits the fatal mistake of contracting itself and thus cutting off all expansion and life, it must die.
(p.476, V.7, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Swamiji’s letter to Manmathanath Bhattacharya dt. 5th Sept 1894)