Sri aurobindo quotes

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.

The cup has to be left clean and empty for the divine liquor to be poured into it.

The supreme state of human love is...the unity of one soul in two bodies.

My God is love and sweetly suffers all.

One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere.

There is no greater pride and glory than to be a perfect instrument of the Master.

Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse; We make of our own enemies our guests.

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.

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.

Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality..... To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits.

That within us which seeks to know and to progress is not the mind but something behind it which makes use of it.

Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.

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.

Man is a transitional being, he is not final; for in him and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees which climb to a divine supermanhood. The step from man towards superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth's evolution. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring, but troubled and limited human existence — inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process.

After having stopped the lower activities of the mind, it must be made receptive; and, instead of weaving all kinds of empty and idle thoughts, the mind should receive intuitions from above.

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.

The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit.

When Reason died, then Wisdom was born.

Outside and above the mind there is the play of a consciousness which is lighted by the higher Truth, but man is not conscious of it and of that he has to be conscious.

Nothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or with things, comes by chance or accident or is really at the mercy of external causes.

When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge.

True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become.

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.

Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.

One mighty deed can change the course of things; a lonely thought becomes omnipotent.

When mind is still, then truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.

All existence is a manifestation of God.

But few are those who tread the sunlit path; Only the pure in soul can walk in light.

By your stumbling, the world is perfected.

Man's freedom is relative and it cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature.

[S]tand aside and watch the working of the divine power in yourself.

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

The expression "from above" is for us only a way of speaking. Many receive from above the command for action - we call it intuition.

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 Godward endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided 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, Sanatana Dharma.

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.

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.

To have a developed intellect is always helpful if one can enlighten it from above and turn it to a divine use.

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.

The great are strongest when they stand alone, A God-given might of being is their force.

To doubt the experience is to discourage it. Let it be developed, see what is in it.

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.

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.

Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius.

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.

Trust the divine power, and she will free the godlike elements in you and shape all into an expression of divine nature.

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.

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.

Impossibility is only a sum of greater unrealised possibles. It veils an advanced stage and a yet unaccomplished journey.

To hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition.

Detachment is the beginning of mastery.

Each victory gained over oneself means new strength to gain more victories.

The Divine Truth is greater than any religion or creed or scripture or idea or philosophy.

What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.

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.

You carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realization perfect. If you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use the one to realize the other.

A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.

No danger can perturb my spirit's calm.

Evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence.

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.

That which we call the Hindu religion is really the Eternal religion because it embraces all others.

What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.

Arise, transcend Thyself, Thou art man and the whole nature of man Is to become more than himself.

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.

The inside must be made entirely calm and quiet and there should reign an upward aspiration - a state of awaiting.

All desires and egoism will have to be banished from the being.

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.

Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act. All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an idea began to play in divine self–consciousness.

The mind has these four levels: physical, vital, buddhi, higher mind. The Supermind is far above these.

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.

What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being.

Witness and stand back from Nature, that is the first step to the soul's freedom.

He who chooses the infinite has been chosen by the infinite.

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.

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.

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 speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.

When thou findest thyself scorning another, look then at thy own heart and laugh at thy folly.

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.

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.

War is a dangerous teacher and physical victory leads often to a moral defeat.

In the normal play of our mind there are all sorts of perversions; hence the need to stop all these things and inculcate right thinking, right willing - in other words, Truth must be established.

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.

Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.

Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.

Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.

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.

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

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.

The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself.

To be free from all egoistic motive, careful of truth in speech and action, void of self-will and self-assertion, watchful in all things, is the condition for being a flawless servant.

All thoughts, desires, conventions, attachments which come from outside must be ruthlessly pushed away.

Peace is the first condition, without which nothing else can be stable.

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.

Sin and virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection.

Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal.

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.

Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will find them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so fiercely censured.

In order to see, you have to stop being in the middle of the picture

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.

The only work that spiritually purifies us is that which is done without personal motives.

The principle of Yoga is the turning of one or of all powers of our human existence into a means of reaching divine Being.

Even in rags I am a god,fallen I am divine,high I triumph when down-trod,long I live when slain!

Our human knowledge is a candle burnt On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.

The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught.

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.

The soul in man is greater than his fate.

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.

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.

Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future

But difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome.

Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.

Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.

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.

Material things are not to be despised-without them there can be no manifestation in the material world.

You have however within you an inclination towards completeness.

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.

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.

One has to do sadhana for the total manifestation of the Divine in oneself.

The all-embracing vast being which is there behind the play of the universe and with which you will have to identify yourself - for this is your true self.

There is nothing small in God's eyes; let there be nothing small in thine