Sri Aurobindo Quotes

Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950), born Aurobindo Ghosh was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. But Sri Aurobindo is mainly known for his work in spirituality. In the initial phase of his life, he was an prominent indian freedom fighter. But later on after an vision of Lord Krishna (enlightened mystic ), He renounced everything and took spirituality whole heartedly.
The central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision was the evolution of human life into life divine. These words of Sri Aurobindo define the theme of his work "Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's process."

Sri Aurobindo tried to synthesized Eastern and Western philosophy, religion, literature, and psychology in writings. Sri Aurobindo works include philosophy; poetry; translations of and commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Gita; plays; literary, social, political, and historical criticism; devotional works; spiritual journals and three volumes of letters. But principal philosophical writings of Sri Aurobindo are 'The Life Divine' and 'The Synthesis of Yoga', while his principal poetic work is 'Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol' (which is sometimes known as fifth veda)

1. Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.
    
2. There is nothing small in God's eyes; let there be nothing small in thine.
    
3. A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.
    
4. 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.
    
5. In God's providence there is no evil, but only good or its preparation.
    
6. Others boast of their love for God. My boast is that I did not love God; it was He who loved me and sought me out and forced me to belong to Him.
    
7. When I was mounting upon ever higher crests of His joy, I asked myself whether there was no limit to the increase of bliss and almost I grew afraid of God's embraces.
    
8. My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed and alarmed and prevented him. It was not till he wrested it from me by force that I saw how my soul had been hidden from me.
    
9. Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
    
10. He who would win high spiritual degrees, must pass endless tests and examinations. But most are anxious only to bribe the examiner.
     
11. 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.
     
12. Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.
     
13. Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.
     
14. 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.
     
15. 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.
     
16. God took a child to fondle him in His bosom of delight; but the mother wept and would not be consoled because her child no longer existed.
     
17. Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.
     
18. Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, "What have I to forgive and whom?"
     
19. 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.
     
20. 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.
     
21. Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects.
     
22. The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo, even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous.
     
23. O soldier and hero of God, where for thee is sorrow or shame or suffering? For thy life is a glory, thy deeds a consecration, victory thy apotheosis, defeat thy triumph.
     
24. 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.
     
25. Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius. It is dangerous for an army to be led by veterans; for on the other side God may place Napoleon.