Sri Aurobindo Quotes

197 Sourced Quotes

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.

Sri Aurobindo
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.

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

Sri Aurobindo
For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony.

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

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

Sri Aurobindo
The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding.

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
Evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sri Aurobindo
Transform the divided individual into the world-personality; let all thyself be the divine. This is thy goal.

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
As in a studio of creative Death
The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
All who would raise the fallen world must come
Under the dangerous arches of their power;
For even the radiant children of the gods
To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell. This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

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

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
Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling.... Of that which is in mortal in mortals, and possessed of the truth, is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers.... Become high uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in as the things of the Godhead.

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

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

Sri Aurobindo