Sri Aurobindo

“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.”

“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.”

“I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.”

“Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will find them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so fiercely censured.”

“India is the meeting place of the religions and among these Hinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex thing, not so much a religion as a great diversified and yet subtly unified mass of spiritual thought, realization and aspiration.”

“A thinking puppet is the mind of life: Its choice is the work of elemental strengths That know not their own birth and end and cause And glimpse not the immense intent they serve. In this nether life of man drab-hued and dull, Yet filled with poignant small ignoble things, The conscious Doll is pushed a hundred ways And feels the push but not the hands that drive. For none can see the masked ironic troupe To whom our figure-selves are marionettes, Our deeds unwitting movements in their grasp, Our passionate strife an entertainment’s scene.”

“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 rightly seen in the sole light, cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.”

“The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail.”

“That which we call the Hindu religion is really the Eternal religion because it embraces all others.”

“As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.”

“To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.”

“What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.”

“... for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image.”

“It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.”

“My God is love and sweetly suffers all.”

“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.”

“For what the Spirit sees becomes a truthAnd what the soul imagines is made a world”

“The Gita is the greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race.”

“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.”

“The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:It longed for the adventure of Ignorance”