Sri Aurobindo Quotes (182) Spiritual Sayings
About the Author: Sri Aurobindo (Sri Ôrobindo) (15 August 1872 - 5 December 1950), born
Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose (Ôrobindo Ghosh), was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated man but also transformed his nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa ("The Mother"), he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He died on 5 December 1950 in Pondicherry. He was the first Indian to create a major literary corpus in English. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with theoretical aspects of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with practical guidance to Integral Yoga; and Savitri, an epic poem which refers to a place in the Mahabaratha, where its characters actualise integral yoga in their lives.
His works also include philosophy, poetry, translations and commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita. See website for more info - http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/
“True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become.”
― Sri Aurobindo
“There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness.
When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.”
― Sri Aurobindo
“My God is love and sweetly suffers all.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol
“The great are strongest when they stand alone,
A God-given might of being is their force.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Savitri
“Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future”
― Sri Aurobindo
“But few are those who tread the sunlit path;
Only the pure in soul can walk in light.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Savitri
“It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice
“I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.”
― Sri Aurobindo
“As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Teaching and Method of Practice
“The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail.”
― Sri Aurobindo
“By our stumbling the world is perfected”
― Sri Aurobindo
While doing work if the mind continues to be active let it be so, but there must be at the same time a capacity for silence.
― Sri Aurobindo
An aimless life is always a troubled life. Every individual should have an aim. But do not forget that the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life. Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others. Whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realized unless you have realized perfection in yourself.
― Sri Aurobindo
In order to see, you have to stop being in the middle of the picture
― Sri Aurobindo
All existence is a manifestation of God.
― Sri Aurobindo
The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.
― Sri Aurobindo
The yoga we practice is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal Mukti, although Mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the liberation and transformation of the human being. It is not personal Ananda, but the bringing down of the divine Ananda - Christ's kingdom of heaven, our Satyayuga - upon the earth.
― Sri Aurobindo
A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away
― Sri Aurobindo
Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage.
― Sri Aurobindo
When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.
― Sri Aurobindo
One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere.
― Sri Aurobindo
The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength everything else will be added to us easily and naturally.
― Sri Aurobindo
Each victory gained over oneself means new strength to gain more victories.
― Sri Aurobindo
The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being.
― Sri Aurobindo
If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose.
― Sri Aurobindo
The fly that touches honey cannot use it's wings; so too the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins it's freedom and hinders contemplation.
― Sri Aurobindo
Everyone has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it & use it. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use.
― Sri Aurobindo
Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's process.
― Sri Aurobindo
We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again ... We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.
― Sri Aurobindo
The supreme state of human love is...the unity of one soul in two bodies.
― Sri Aurobindo
There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.
― Sri Aurobindo
There are four great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ , the exile of Krishna in Brindaban and the colloquy on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindaban created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanized Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity.
― Sri Aurobindo
The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. The life everlasting is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. Life then does not die... but the forms are dissolved.
― Sri Aurobindo
Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.
― Sri Aurobindo
The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.
― Sri Aurobindo
The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. The life everlasting is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. Life then does not die... but the forms are dissolved.
― Sri Aurobindo
Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.
― Sri Aurobindo
Perfect health, sincerity, honesty, straightforwardness, courage, disinterestedness, unselfishness, patience, endurance, perseverance, peace, calm, self control are all things that are taught infinitely better by example than by beautiful speeches.
― Sri Aurobindo
The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought:
― Sri Aurobindo
By your stumbling, the world is perfected.
― Sri Aurobindo
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
― Sri Aurobindo
Sin and virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection.
― Sri Aurobindo
He who chooses the infinite has been chosen by the infinite.
― Sri Aurobindo
Hinduism ... gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the God ward endeavor of the human spirit. An immense many-sided and many staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Santana Dharma...
― Sri Aurobindo
Sit in meditation ! But do not think ! Look only at your mind ! You will see thoughts coming into it ! Before they can enter, throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence.
― Sri Aurobindo
Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.
― Sri Aurobindo
Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude.
― Sri Aurobindo
[S]tand aside and watch the working of the divine power in yourself.
― Sri Aurobindo
Trust the divine power, and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of divine nature.
― Sri Aurobindo
The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value.
― Sri Aurobindo
The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust and ill-organised society, and our public charities are but the first tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.
― Sri Aurobindo
Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.
― Sri Aurobindo
We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.
― Sri Aurobindo
The subliminal mind receives and remembers all those touches that delight the soul. Our soul takes joy in this right touching by the Essence of all experience.
― Sri Aurobindo
Detachment is the beginning of mastery.
― Sri Aurobindo
A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point , but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.
― Sri Aurobindo
The spiritual path is one of falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, turning and looking sheepishly at God and then taking the next step.
― Sri Aurobindo
Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably.
― Sri Aurobindo
The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit.
― Sri Aurobindo
All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, - those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders.
― Sri Aurobindo
One mighty deed can change the course of things; a lonely thought becomes omnipotent.
― Sri Aurobindo
Yoga is a generic name for any discipline by which one attempts to pass out of the limits of one's ordinary mental consciousness into a greater spiritual consciousness.
― Sri Aurobindo
Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.
― Sri Aurobindo
For the powers of our mind, life, and body are bound to their own limitations, and however high they may rise or however widely expand, they cannot rise beyond them. But still, mental man can open to what is beyond him and call down a Supramental Light, Truth, and Power to work in him and do what the mind cannot do. If mind cannot by effort become what is beyond mind, Supermind can descend and transform mind into its own substance.
― Sri Aurobindo
They proved to me by convincing reasons that God does not exist; Afterwards I saw God, for he came and embraced me. And now what am I to believe- the reasoning of others or my own experience? Truth is what the soul has seen and experienced; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.
― Sri Aurobindo
Recover the source of all strength in yourself, and all else will be added to you ... political freedom, the mastery of human thought, the hegemony of the world.
― Sri Aurobindo
Hidden nature is secret God.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Divine Truth is greater than any religion or creed or scripture or idea or philosophy.
― Sri Aurobindo
That which we call the Hindu religion is really the Eternal religion because it embraces all others.
― Sri Aurobindo
India saw from the beginning, and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.
― Sri Aurobindo
What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.
― Sri Aurobindo
Faith is the soul's witness to something not yet manifested, achieved or realised, but which yet the Knower within us, even in the absence of all indications, feels to be true or supremely worth following or achieving.
― Sri Aurobindo
All thoughts, desires, conventions, attachments which come from outside must be ruthlessly pushed away.
― Sri Aurobindo
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.
― Sri Aurobindo
Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.
― Sri Aurobindo
Peace is the first condition, without which nothing else can be stable.
― Sri Aurobindo
Death is but changing of our robes to wait in wedding garments at the Eternal's gate.
― Sri Aurobindo
The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.
― Sri Aurobindo
The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a spec of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.
― Sri Aurobindo
Remember that you are at an exceptional hour in a unique epoch, that you have this great happiness, this invaluable privilege, of being present at the birth of a new world.
― Sri Aurobindo
The inside must be made entirely calm and quiet and there should reign an upward aspiration - a state of awaiting.
― Sri Aurobindo
There is nothing small in God's eyes; let there be nothing small in thine
― Sri Aurobindo
Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius.
― Sri Aurobindo
Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars.
― Sri Aurobindo
Only when Eternity takes Time by the hand, Only when infinity weds the finite's thought, Can man be free from himself and live with God.
― Sri Aurobindo
The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge....
― Sri Aurobindo
Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal.
― Sri Aurobindo
Evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence.
― Sri Aurobindo
A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.
― Sri Aurobindo
A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way.
― Sri Aurobindo
We can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic.
― Sri Aurobindo
If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.
― Sri Aurobindo
If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth.
― Sri Aurobindo
You have however within you an inclination towards completeness.
― Sri Aurobindo
What comes from outside, one mistakes it as coming from inside. So many thoughts etc. move about outside in the universal - these manifest inside you. All these you must push away as foreign to you and the inside must be made peaceful, calm and quiet; then it will start descending from above.
― Sri Aurobindo
All kinds of indications will come from above and whatever you do must be referred to the Above.
― Sri Aurobindo
The mind of an ordinary man is truly near the heart.
― Sri Aurobindo
To have a developed intellect is always helpful if one can enlighten it from above and turn it to a divine use.
― Sri Aurobindo
Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.
― Sri Aurobindo
The language of the Veda itself is sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that same vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit fot the impersonal knowledge.
― Sri Aurobindo
The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the door of the spirit.
― Sri Aurobindo
But difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome.
― Sri Aurobindo
All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses.
― Sri Aurobindo
Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone.
― Sri Aurobindo
When Reason died, then Wisdom was born.
― Sri Aurobindo
She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence.
― Sri Aurobindo
The mind is running on all sides to think about many things, - what we call thoughts coming from outside. We must withdraw the mind from these distractions and make it abide in the self. Thus guarding the peace within we shall have to do the work without.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.
― Sri Aurobindo
When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion.
― Sri Aurobindo
The navel region is the centre of the vital. It is from here that the movements of the vital rise upward. Above the navel and behind the chest is the centre of the play of emotions and below this takes place the play of the physical. Mulādhāra is the base of the physical. In between the Mulādhāra and the navel, there is another centre of the vital.
― Sri Aurobindo
What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.
― Sri Aurobindo
Is it true that existence consists only in the action of energy? Or is it not rather that energy is an output of Existence?
― Sri Aurobindo
Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.
― Sri Aurobindo
There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.
― Sri Aurobindo
Terrorism thrives on administrative violence and injustice; that is the only atmosphere in which it can thrive and grow. It sometimes follows the example of indiscriminate violence from above; it sometimes, though very rarely, sets it from below. But the power above which follows the example from below is on the way to committing suicide.
― Sri Aurobindo
Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.
― Sri Aurobindo
India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.
― Sri Aurobindo
No danger can perturb my spirit's calm.
― Sri Aurobindo
Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects.
― Sri Aurobindo
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
― Sri Aurobindo
The soul in man is greater than his fate...
― Sri Aurobindo
The Gita is the greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race.
― Sri Aurobindo
Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities.
― Sri Aurobindo
Religions, creeds and forms are only a characteristic outward sign of the spiritual impulsion and religion itself is the intensive action by which it tries to find its inward force. Its expansive movement comes in the thought which it throws out on life, the ideals which open up new horizons and which the intellect accepts and life labours to assimilate.
― Sri Aurobindo
The anarchic is the true divine state of man in the end as in the beginning; but in between it would lead us straight to the devil and his kingdom.
― Sri Aurobindo
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
― Sri Aurobindo
Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.
― Sri Aurobindo
The cup has to be left clean and empty for the divine liquor to be poured into it.
― Sri Aurobindo
We are sons of God
― And must be even as he.
Only the soul that is naked and unashamed, can be pure and innocent , even as Adam was in the primal garden of humanity .
― Sri Aurobindo
To doubt the experience is to discourage it. Let it be developed, see what is in it.
― Sri Aurobindo
What is required is faith. Man has body, life and mind but that is not all that constitutes man. He has risen to the mind as a result of evolution. Now a higher consciousness will be evolved - this I call Supermind. It is the instrument of the Divine Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness.
― Sri Aurobindo
The experiences of your past life which are stored within come up to the surface to be rejected. By rejecting all these by and by the inside will have to be cleansed.
― Sri Aurobindo
Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.
― Sri Aurobindo
What do you want to do sadhana for? The aim should not be the satisfaction of egoism: "I want to be a great yogi; I shall have so much power and with that power I shall establish myself in the world." All such thoughts must be thrown far away.
― Sri Aurobindo
The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material
― Sri Aurobindo
To hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition.
― Sri Aurobindo
An active mind needs an outlet. If it stops by itself from within, well and good; otherwise one should not try to stop this by force.
― Sri Aurobindo
One must have first of all a solid foundation.
― Sri Aurobindo
You have a strong active nature. And this in you is a point of strength. If you can mould it rightly this will become a very great strength. On the other hand, this too is your weak point - a hindrance in sadhana.
― Sri Aurobindo
War is a dangerous teacher and physical victory leads often to a moral defeat.
― Sri Aurobindo
There is a veil between the Supermind above and the lower Prakriti below - the veil of ingrained formations. This veil may completely withdraw or be partially withdrawn. Thus even if there is some little opening, with the contact of Light from above the lower nature will get slowly changed.
― Sri Aurobindo
The expression "from above" is for us only a way of speaking. Many receive from above the command for action - we call it intuition.
― Sri Aurobindo
It will not do to depend on the mind alone.
― Sri Aurobindo
In order to satisfy the vital being, it must be offered some activity, and at the same time the mind should be slowly made to take interest in yoga.
― Sri Aurobindo
A hidden Bliss is at the root of things.
A mute Delight regards Time's countless works:
To house God's joy in things Space gave wide room,
To house God's joy in self our souls were born.
― Sri Aurobindo
The only work that spiritually purifies us is that which is done without personal motives.
― Sri Aurobindo
The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous...
― Sri Aurobindo
The one aim of [my] yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature.
― Sri Aurobindo
Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Hindu religion appears ... as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.
― Sri Aurobindo
She saw the myriad gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our present life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendors of the spirit.
― Sri Aurobindo
India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.
― Sri Aurobindo
Not only a truer knowledge, but a greater power comes to one in the quietude and silence of a mind that, instead of bubbling on the surface, can go to its own depths and listen.
― Sri Aurobindo
There is no greater pride and glory than to be a perfect instrument of the Master.
― Sri Aurobindo
Your mind has some clearness and capacity for right thinking; it opens towards the heights, but for its own sake, - to receive light from above for its own activity.
― Sri Aurobindo
The mind has these four levels: physical, vital, buddhi, higher mind. The Supermind is far above these.
― Sri Aurobindo
Material things are not to be despised-without them there can be no manifestation in the material world.
― Sri Aurobindo
I say, of the Congress, then, this that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Purusha should assume at all times the attitude of a giver of sanction while rejecting the lower movements and accepting only truth-movements.
― Sri Aurobindo
In order to explain why the ordinary Sadhus and Yogis take to tobacco and gānja [an intoxicant], I said that these cause stimulation of the physical brain. But these have reactions. And to stimulate the brain thus is not the proper process.
― Sri Aurobindo
This world is a vast unbroken totality, a deep solidarity joins its contrary powers.
― Sri Aurobindo
The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught.
― Sri Aurobindo
One can see light above the head; that indicates a consciousness outside the body. But that itself is not the Truth-Consciousness or Vijnana. But much light descending from there illumines this consciousness.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself.
― Sri Aurobindo
The Bhagavad-Gita is a true scripture of the human race a living creation rather than a book, with a new message for every age and a new meaning for every civilization.
― Sri Aurobindo
The great are strongest when they stand alone, A God-given might of being is their force.
― Sri Aurobindo
As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.
― Sri Aurobindo
That within us which seeks to know and to progress is not the mind but something behind it which makes use of it.
― Sri Aurobindo
But what after all, behind appearance, is the seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself, returning to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a life that is would-be sentient, to be more than sentient, to be again divinely self-conscious, free, infinite, immortal.
― Sri Aurobindo
Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction.
― Sri Aurobindo
Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will find them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so fiercely censured.
― Sri Aurobindo
What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.
― Sri Aurobindo
Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.
― Sri Aurobindo
The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.
― Sri Aurobindo
Death fosters life that life may suckle death.
― Sri Aurobindo
To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.
― Sri Aurobindo
To make a revolution is not in the grain of our people's nature.
― Sri Aurobindo
Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all.
― Sri Aurobindo
Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.
― Sri Aurobindo
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