Quotes from Sri Aurobindo

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

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

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Person is a bubble on Time's sea.

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.

The supreme end is the freedom of the spirit.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Death fosters life that life may suckle death.

There is a knowledge in the heart of sleep.

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.

Man's freedom is relative and it cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of his nature.

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.

When mind is still, then Truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.

Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars.

Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.