"These three elements make the whole of Art, perfection of expressive form, discovery of beauty, revelation of the soul and essence of things and the powers of creative consciousness and Ananda of which they are the vehicles. Art for Art's sake certainly; Art as a perfect form and discovery of Beauty; but also Art for the soul's sake, the spirit's sake and the expression of all that the soul, the spirit wants to seize through the medium of beauty. And not only to enlarge Art towards the widest wideness but to ascend with it to the heights that climb towards the Highest is and must be part of our aesthetic and spiritual endeavour." - Sri Aurobindo

"To reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world — only when one looked through the immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms, materialised shadows without true substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real." - Sri Aurobindo

"The Divine is more than a man or woman, a stretch of land or a creed, opinion, discovery or principle. He is the Person beyond all persons, the Home and Country of all souls, the Truth of which truths are only imperfect figures. And can He not then be loved and sought for his own sake, as and more than these have been by men even in their lesser selves and nature? What your reasoning ignores is what is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine — something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive." - Sri Aurobindo

"All things, in either case, are the results of a Shakti, energy or force. There is no action without a Force or Energy doing the action and bringing about its consequence. Further, anything that has no Force in it is either something dead or something unreal or something inert and without consequence. If there is no such thing as spiritual consciousness, there can be no reality of Yoga, and if there is no Yoga-force, spiritual force, Yoga shakti, then also there can be no effectivity in Yoga." - Sri Aurobindo

"I have always said that the vital is indispensable for the spiritual action, without it there can be no complete expression, no realisation of life, hardly even any realisation in sadhana. When I speak of the vital resistance or of the revolts of the vital, it is the unregenerated outer vital full of desire and ego and the lower passions of which I speak. I could say the same against the mind and the physical when they obstruct or oppose, but precisely because the vital is so powerful and indispensable, its obstruction, opposition or refusal of co-operation is more strikingly effective and its wrong mixtures are more dangerous to the sadhana." - Sri Aurobindo

"The hostile forces can use anything for their purpose by combining it with others to make part of a total suggestion. They can use what is in itself quite harmless or true for a contrary purpose — they can use something the Mother or myself do or say to disturb somebody by putting a certain explanation or interpretation upon it — they can use a spiritual truth like that of surrender to persuade somebody to surrender to themselves as happened in the case of N. and others. The hostile forces exist and have been known to yogic experience ever since the days of the Veda and Zoroaster in Asia and in Europe also from old times." - Sri Aurobindo

"The difficulty you feel or any sadhak feels about sadhana is not really a question of meditation versus bhakti versus works, it is a difficulty of the attitude to be taken, the approach or whatever you like to call it. Yours seems to be characterised on one side by a tremendous effort in the mind, on the other by a gloomy certitude in the vital which seems to watch and mutter under its breath if not aloud, "Yes, yes, go ahead, my fine fellow, but — nothing has ever happened, nothing is happening and nothing will ever happen" and at the end of the meditation, "What did I tell you, nothing happened"." - Sri Aurobindo

"What the Mother spoke of was not self-analysis or dissection. Analyses and dissection are mental things which can deal with the inanimate or make the live dead; they are not spiritual methods. What the Mother spoke of was a seeing of oneself and of all the living movements of the being and the nature, a vivid observation of the personalities and forces that move on the stage of our being, their motives, their impulses, their potentialities — an observation as interesting as the seeing and understanding of a drama or a novel, a living vision and perception of how things are done in us which brings a living mastery over this inner universe." - Sri Aurobindo

"Purification and consecration are two great necessities of sadhana. It is not a fact that one must be pure in heart before one can have any Yogic experience, but those who have experiences before purification run a great risk. It is much better to have the heart pure first, for then the way becomes safe. Nor can the Divine dwell in one's consciousness, if that consciousness is obscure with impurity, that is why I advocate the psychic change of the nature first, for that means the purification of the heart, the turning of it to the Divine, the subjection of the mind, of the vital passions, the physical instincts to the control of the inner being, the soul." - Sri Aurobindo

"All can be done by the Divine, the heart and nature purified, the inner consciousness awakened, the veils removed, if one gives oneself to the Divine with trust and confidence — and even if one cannot do so at once, yet the more one does so, the more the inner help and guidance comes and the contact and the experience of the Divine grows within. It can and does happen in that way if one has trust and confidence in the Divine and the will to surrender. For this involves one's putting oneself in the hands of the Divine rather than trusting to one's own efforts and it implies one's putting one's confidence in the Divine and a self-giving." - Sri Aurobindo

"What happened is a thing that often happens and it reproduced in your case the usual stages. First, you sat down in prayer — that means a call to the Above. Next came the necessary condition for the answer to the prayer to be effective — "little by little a sort of restfulness came", or the quietude of the consciousness which is necessary before the Power that has to act can act. Then the rush of the Force or Power, "a flood of energy and sense of power and glow", and the natural concentration of the being in inspiration and expression, the action of the Power." - Sri Aurobindo

"I do not know what Krishnaprem said but the statement that nobody can have a successful meditation or realise anything till he is pure and perfect contradicts my own experience. I have always had realisation by meditation first and the purification started afterwards as a result. I have seen many get important, even fundamental realisations by meditation who could not be said to have a great inner development. Are all Yogis who have meditated to effect and had great realisations in their inner consciousness perfect in their nature? It does not look like it to me." - Sri Aurobindo

"It was certainly an experience and an experience of great value, a psychic experience par excellence. A feeling of velvety softness within — an ineffable plasticity within is a psychic experience and can be nothing else. It means a modification of the substance of the consciousness especially in the vital-emotional part, and such a modification prolonged or repeated till it became permanent would mean a great step in what I call the psychic transformation of the being. It is just these modifications in the inner substance that make transformation possible." - Sri Aurobindo

"You feel depressed in reading the Bases of Yoga, because your mind becomes active at the wrong end, from the point of view of your obsession about inability, hopelessness, past failure enforcing future failure. The right way to read these things is not to be mentally active, but receive with a quiet mind leaving the knowledge given to go in and bear its fruit hereafter at the proper time, not ask how one can practice it now or try to apply it to immediate circumstances in which it may not fit." - Sri Aurobindo