Aurobindo Quotes

“Cornellisen charged Jung for daring to take credit for discovering the 'collective unconscious' which is simply a misnomer and a poor conceptualisation of inner worlds known since millennia in India and even the mystical traditions of Europe”
― Rajiv Malhotra, Battle For Consciousness Theory: The Battle for Consciousness Theory: A Response to Ken Wilber’s Hijacking of Sri Aurobindo and Other Indian Thought on the right.

“We do not belong to the past dawns, but to the noons of the future.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Bhagavad Gita and Its Message

“Aurobindo's (and most Hindus') attitude of tolerance regarding Islam is conceived as the condescending tolerance of an adult for the juvenile follies of a teenager, not the respect due to an equal.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.”
― Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Aphorisms

“But if it is to survive,’ he continued, ‘it must get rid of the curse of the heavy pedantic style contracted by it in its decline with the lumbering impossible compounds and the overweight of hair-splitting erudition.”
― Gautam Chikermane, Reading Sri Aurobindo

“The text has to be studied with a great patience, a great passivity, waiting for experience, waiting for light & then waiting for still more light. Insufficient data, haste of conclusions, wilful ramming of one’s own favourite opinions into the text, wilful grasping at an imperfect or unfinished experience, wilful reading of a single narrow truth as the sole meaning of this complex harmony of thought, experience & knowledge which we call the Veda,—these are fruitful sources of error. But if a man can make his mind like a blank slate, if he can enter into the condition of bottomless passivity proper to the state of the calm all-embracing Chaitanya Atma, not attempting to fix what the Truth shall be, but allowing Truth to manifest herself in his soul, then he will find that it is the nature of the Sruti to reveal perfectly its own message…..By entering into communion with the soul of the thinker which still broods behind the inspired language, we come to realise what he saw, and what he put into his words, what waits there to make itself known to us.”
― Gautam Chikermane, Reading Sri Aurobindo

“For poetic effect rely wholly on the power of your substance, the magic of rhythm and the sincerity of your expression — if you can add subtlety so much the better, but not at the cost of sincerity and straightforwardness. Do not construct your poetry with the brain-mind, the mere intellect — that is not the source of true inspiration, write always from the inner heart of emotion and vision.”
― Gautam Chikermane, Reading Sri Aurobindo

“A wandering hand of pale enchanted light


That glowed along a fading moment’s brink,


Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge


A gate of dreams ajar on mystery’s verge…


The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak


From the reclining body of a god.


Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first


Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,


Outpoured the revelation and the flame…


A message from the unknown immortal Light


Ablaze upon creation’s quivering edge,


Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues


And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.

- Sri Aurobindo, Savitri”
― Gautam Chikermane, Reading Sri Aurobindo