SRI AUROBINDO QUOTES II

Indian poet & philosopher (1872-1950)

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

New Lamps for Old


When I approached God at that time, I hardly had a living faith in Him. The agnostic was in me, the atheist was in me, the sceptic was in me and I was not absolutely sure that there was a God at all. I did not feel His presence. Yet something drew me to the truth of the Vedas, the truth of the Gita, the truth of the Hindu religion. I felt there must be a mighty truth somewhere in this Yoga, a mighty truth in this religion based on the Vedanta.

SRI AUROBINDO

The Uttarpara Address, May 30, 1909

Tags: God


Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning -- and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight -- that life cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.

SRI AUROBINDO

The Renaissance in India

Tags: India


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

SRI AUROBINDO

Ahana


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

The Renaissance in India


Even soul-force, when it is effective, destroys. Only those who have used it with eyes open, know how much more destructive it can be than the sword and the cannon.

SRI AUROBINDO

"Kurukshetra", Essays on the Gita


The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit.

SRI AUROBINDO

Bhagavad Gita and Its Message


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.

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Aphorisms

Tags: inspiration


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

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Aphorisms

Tags: sin, virtue


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.

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Glimpses


Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Aphorisms


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

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Aphorisms


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.

SRI AUROBINDO

attributed, Humanimal

Tags: life


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

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Glimpses

Tags: knowledge


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.

SRI AUROBINDO

Sri Aurobindo: The foundations of Indian culture and the renaissance in India


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

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Aphorisms

Tags: genius


The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

SRI AUROBINDO

Gems from Sri Aurobindo

Tags: time


Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

SRI AUROBINDO

Thoughts and Aphorisms

Tags: evolution


That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others.

SRI AUROBINDO

The Uttarpara Address, May 30, 1909


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

Arya: A Philosophical Review, January 1921

Tags: India