Aurobindo Quotes & Sayings

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

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

There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson. — B.W. Powe

Detachment is the beginning of mastery. — 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

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

If it be true that spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation in the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man on earth. — Sri Aurobindo

Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and
free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection. — 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

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

Yes, this Purusha consciousness must be maintained; otherwise the calm will not last. The knocks and blows that come from outside cannot disturb one, if this Purusha consciousness remains at the back. — Sri Aurobindo

Thy goal, the road thou choosest are thy fate. — Sri Aurobindo

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

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

Not in the state of unconsciousness, but in full awareness when the higher Power will descend into and direct us, then only the yogic life will begin. — Sri Aurobindo

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

A fugitive paradise smiles at him from her eyes: He dreams of her beauty made for ever his, He dreams of his mastery her limbs shall bear, He dreams of the magic of her breasts of bliss. — 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 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

The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit. — 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

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

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

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

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

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 within; be not shaken by outward happenings. — 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

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

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

New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths, Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts. — Sri Aurobindo

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

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

As Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin knew, the future of humankind is God-consciousness. — Ken Wilber

What you call the psychic being is the mind of the vital. The heart is the seat of this mind. And this mind is the essence of the senses. It receives things from outside, acts upon things that are outside - knows, gives consent, takes interest in them. But this mind cannot be the Ishwara, but it is the knower, the giver of the consent. — Sri Aurobindo

The Force which has to be called down from above must be pure and quiet because there are all kinds of forces - it will not do to call them all. And one must have sincerity. — Sri Aurobindo

rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the — 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

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

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

Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish, Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire, Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow. — 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

All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure. — Sri Aurobindo

The soul in man is greater than his fate ... — 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

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

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

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

PUBLISHER'S NOTE To seize the knowledge of the UNKNOWABLE needs a language, which is at once symbolically creative, revealingly poetic, infinitely plastic, luminously rhythmic, automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable descent of truth of idea, word and action. — Maa Krishna 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

My God is love and sweetly suffers all. — Sri Aurobindo

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and dificult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers. — 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

An incense floated in the quivering air, A mystic happiness trembled in the breast As if the invisible Beloved had come Assuming the sudden loveliness of a face And close glad hands could seize his fugitive feet And the world change with the beauty of a smile. — Sri Aurobindo

For what the Spirit sees becomes a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world — 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

Turkey, Japan do great work because they can keep under control their little personal selfishness, egoism, jealousy, etc. when they get down to work. — 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 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 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

The consciousness of the supreme Purusha remains above, but in the mind there may be a Purusha consciousness which they call the cosmic consciousness - it is wide, all-pervading, one. Outside this goes on the play of Prakriti. — 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

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

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

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

The desire of your vital being is towards work. And the vital being won't find any interest in yoga so long as you do not have any experience of the higher and fuller life that is in yoga. As long as this experience is not there, the vital being will not find any interest. — Sri Aurobindo

Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow. — Sri Aurobindo

By your stumbling, the world is perfected. — Sri Aurobindo

Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, "What have I to forgive and whom?" — Sri Aurobindo

This is our sacred land, Bharat, a land whose glories are sung by the
Gods, a land visualized by Mahayogi Aurobindo as the living manifestation
of the Divine Mother of the universe, the Jaganmaataa, the Aadishakti,
the Mahaamaayaa, the Mahaadurgaa, Who has assumed concrete form to
enable us to see Her and worship Her,...a land worshipped by all our seers and
sages as Maatrubhoomi, Dharmabhoomi, Karmabhoomi and Punybhoomi, a
veritable Devabhoomi and Mokshabhoomi" - — Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar

The heart's words fall back unheard from Wisdom's throne. — 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

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

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

To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated. — Sri Aurobindo

... for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. — Sri Aurobindo

Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. — Sri Aurobindo

The Gita is the greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race. — Sri Aurobindo

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

Samskrit language, as has been universally recognized by those competent to form a judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect, the most prominent and wonderfully sufficient literary instrument developed by the human mind. — Sri Aurobindo

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

In the middle of an ocean on board a ship, one can get a sense of vastness. — 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

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

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

All can be done if the god-touch is there — Sri Aurobindo

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