Quotes from Sri Aurobindo

Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.

But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending.

In a word, godhead; to remake ourselves in the divine image.

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.

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.

The heart's words fall back unheard from Wisdom's throne.

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.

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.

Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.

When reason died, then Wisdom was born.

There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness.

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

What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.

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

The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains.

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

To feed death with her works is here life's doom.

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.

The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust and ill-organised society, and our public charities are but the first tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.

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.

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.

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.

All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.

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