Sri Aurobindo Quotes

197 Sourced Quotes

The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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