Top 256 Quotes & Sayings by Sri Aurobindo - Page 2

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

All existence is a manifestation of God.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No danger can perturb my spirit's calm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Physical education for the body to be effective must be rigorous and detailed, far sighted and methodological. This will be translated into habits. These habits should be controlled and disciplined, while remaining flexible enough to adapt themselves to circumstances and to the needs of growth and development of the being.

This world is a vast unbroken totality, a deep solidarity joins its contrary powers.

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.

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

The mind of an ordinary man is truly near the heart.

There is a knowledge in the heart of sleep.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The soul in man is greater than his fate.

Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.

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

Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit.

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.

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

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.

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

For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony.