Sri Aurobindo quotes

Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, poet, and spiritual leader who played a major role in India's independence movement. His teachings emphasized the synthesis of spirituality and modernity, advocating for human evolution through spiritual practice. He inspired millions with his vision of a higher consciousness and integral yoga. Here are 224 of his quotes:

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. (Sri Aurobindo)
A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe. View quote
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden. View quote
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
Only the soul that is naked and unashamed, can be pure and innocent, even as Adam was in the primal garden of humanity. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature. View quote
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
Thought is not essential to existence nor its cause, but it is an instrument for becoming; I become what I see in myself. All that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be man's unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells in him. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
Very usually, altruism is only the sublimest form of selfishness. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper. (Sri Aurobindo)
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Sri Aurobindo