At the Edge of Faery and Earth

At the Edge of Faery and Earth

 

Many beautiful women, many different colors

Eyes, skin, hair, souls, auras, spirits, souls — All unique

All I love, in some way or another — More or less

Yet united by a common goal of making the world

 

Creating a better society and environment for the future

Sometimes I think I do not deserve to be in their company

I mostly just fight monsters — They create life and order

In chaos, magic in the midst of stagnation, balance

 

Time passes, generations of human families, on the borderlands

Between the higher and middle words, Earth and Faery

 

Gaia walks with me and tells me of her past lives

As we try our best to positively influence the course

Of history on Earth and in the material universe beyond

 

There are always dark forces that are jealous and resentful

Ignorant or sorrowful — Both inside us and in the worlds outside

Yet there is always hope for redemption in the conflict between

Good and evil — The sides are not always clearly defined

 

And there are always more than two sides between chaos and order

Left and right, male and female, light and darkness, all combined

The Tree of Life and Consciousness uniting the worlds above and below

The play of the cosmos, setting and living landscape, Eldren

In the in-between world, anything is possible — Here, home, and even beyond

Dance of Life

Dance of Life

Sometimes it is hard to know

Who to follow, who to oppose

Which side of a conflict is correct

Most right, or at least less wrong

Each has another side, and another after that one

In the relatively distant future

Things are even more difficult

To understand how to choose

What is right, missing a hundred years

Context — Progress of history, change

Of ideas and ideologies, factions and organizations

Of power and authority — Leaving aside questions

Of how I am where I am now, at this time

More importantly, when I am — This new world

Offers almost undreamed of possibilities

Yet unknown dangers as well, but I cannot say

I regret waking up here and now, though I do miss

The people I left behind — As far as I can tell they are gone

But perhaps there is a way for me to see them again

If I can find out how I came to be here and now

One hundred years distant from everyone I once loved

Organizations of darkness, banal evil in service to horrible goals

And ideals — Extra-dimensional creatures without compassion or ethics

Or at least from a human perspective, except in the peculiar culture

Of the darkness beyond — Our Universe of Light and Darkness

Mingle together — Forms of life completely alien to us

Except perhaps in some of our nightmares, hells — Giant insects

Communities of organization without joy or art or love

At least from our perspective — Some form of love exists there no doubt

And the swirling chaos of apparently infinite darkness, with only a little

Light — And there are some figures of light and wisdom that have dealings

With the dark powers, for their own inscrutable goals, reasons beyond

Our understanding, for now — Out of darkness comes the light

Yet within the darkness continues in its almost infinite varieties

Forms of diversity — Doorways exist between our two worlds

Universes — Guarded by agents of order and chaos, light and darkness

Sometimes close to doorways between the higher realms of pure consciousness

And our Universe — Life and love have transcended all material barriers

Deep darkness of the void beyond our dimension of mixed light and darkness

Combines in the Dance of Life with Light, the five worlds of Eternal Love

The darkness frightens us and yet exhilarates us, providing a source

And destination for all that we do not like about ourselves, others

Our world and cosmos working out the complexity and simplicity of life

In the Universe we call home, in the perhaps infinite expanse of space

Material World — Where beauty in the spiral and circle of time plays out

Evolution Growth Change

Evolution Growth Change

 

Looking back at my past life

Mistakes that seemed unforgivable

Crises that threatened to destroy everything

Or so I thought — My place in the world

And Universe — Now seem small and inconsequential

In retrospect — Except in how they shaped my evolution

And development as a human being

Small and large — Sometimes in ways that I only now

Understand and only partially grasp

 

I can’t blame anyone else but myself

Yet I can explain by describing how others

Might have been wrong, at least in regards

To what would be best for me — Yet who can say

How even the smallest changes in one life

Might positively or negatively affect the future

Present, now — A trillion trillion combinations

Of moments and choices over the course of human

History — And my own — Even if I have only lived

Once, my soul — There is almost an infinity of alternatives

Parallel courses of history, all existing simultaneously

Until the present moment — And choice — Love and life

Time — In my own life and the life of the world — Universe

 

Who can tell if I am not in fact better for all my mistakes

My parents, grandparents, ancestors from all over the world

The ambiguity and uncertainty in my own life and mind today, tonight

Might not be such a terrible thing after all — As long as it does not

Cripple, the door to the void open too much, more than just a crack

Some evolution along with the involution, meeting in the present moment

Future present for every living being sharing the world of possibilities

Growth and change, spiral life, and the arrow and circle of time

The maps in my head can be useful but discovery and exploration

Landscape of my mind and environment, greater and more wondrous

Than even my dreams — The maps help me when I get lost

Sometimes even helping me find the right path, or at least realize

I was on the wrong one in the past, and I can choose a different one

Perhaps even one from a long time ago, in the future past

That is yet new to me now — As long as I am moving forward

With an open heart and mind, in balance with my true self and the cosmos

Nature, love — The forces of order, chaos, and balance between the two

The Universe of Universes and the world we all inhabit, one of many

I am content and maybe even happy, for now — I must train myself

To be alright with the uncertainty and productive chaos of the world

That can be a blessing and not just a curse — As long as I keep

Trying to find some kind of order here, there — Truth within

Myself, if I have the right keys to understanding the all in all

The world and my place in it — Life continues ever onwards

 

As long as life continues on — And we learn from our mistakes

Become better stewards of the Earth and Air and Water — Soul

Of nature, fire of spirit — Humanity — We are only at the beginning

Of our history as a species, only limited by our imagination as a species

Imaginations or lack thereof — Our petty rivalries, ancient quarrels

Among groups of people, desire for power over others, outdated ideas

Ideologies of rigid control or complete freedom without consequences

No order at all — Out of balance with ourselves and nature

Yet we are learning — The old ways that no longer work fade away

With time and evolution of the human mind and spirit towards the source

Giving consciousness, room to new ways of organizing life and spirit

Some so old that they are completely foreign to us, some completely new

Ancient and future paradigms that can allow us to live in harmony

With ourselves and the Universe as one entity experiencing itself, ourself

Becoming aware of all aspects of existence and reality — Life and love

No greed or lust for power over one another and the planet

Belonging to the land, water, air, and sky, more than the other way around

 

Using our intelligence and wisdom to perform a sacred duty of helping

Life to flourish in ever more diverse and beautiful forms on Earth

And when we are ready, planets beyond our own solar system

Stars and galaxies far out in the infinite darkness, blue and white

Calling to us and keeping us company at night — Giving our sun a break

Dimensions and worlds within the deepest parts of our souls, of stars

And in the vast emptiness of space and time, yet almost bursting with light

Meaning and light even in the deepest darkness, the spark of life

Uniting and bringing together disparate individual souls

Throughout the Cosmic Ocean — Binding and bridging our Universe

With each part of itself, realities beyond this physical realm

Dimension, parallel universe — Doorways of consciousness

We can access with the right keys, and the knowledge of where they are

Awareness of the multiple forms of life, light, love everywhere

Inside us and outside our souls, all around us — Beyond

There is always more to discover and explore, always more

Beyond and within our own mind, body, and spirit — Our souls

Connected to the universal cosmic consciousness and awareness

Sailing Through Time on a Cosmic Ocean of Eternal Love

Sailing Through Time on a Cosmic Ocean of Eternal Love

 

Time travel, inhabiting my future self

Learning about alien species visiting Earth

Changing history by following along with myself

Leaving clues and signs for me to find later, earlier

Creating a small army of freedom fighters

Anarchists, socialists, communists united by vision

Of a world free from hunger, injustice, oppression

Taking the best of what the aliens have to offer for humanity

Replacing the old order and hierarchies of power

In the shared goal of making humanity a galactic citizen

Universal belonging, working for peace, justice, stability

And innovation — A bright future of light, life, love for all

Here, and beyond in the vast emptiness of space, other worlds

Transforming humanity’s basest instincts into higher callings

Dedication to truth, perfection, understanding of complexity

Instead of war, violent conflict, extreme competition beyond play

Shared resources, knowledge, wisdom — An Utopia — Life without fear

Problems we take for granted now, in the past, before

The Others come, who are yet to come, yet always here

Bringing new knowledge and wisdom that is yet old

Kept safe by elders of ancient cultures, carried on by future generations

Waiting for the day when they could share with all

Humanity suddenly confronted with the reality

That we are not ever truly alone in the Universe

For better or worse, and there are new, better ways of doing things

Organizing ourselves not only to survive

But thrive, and become full members of the community

Of the Universe of Universes — All times and places linked

By the knowledge and wisdom of the Elder Races

Guides and sometimes exploiters of the younger ones

Humanity — We must evolve and transform ourselves

Into something greater and more beautiful than we can imagine

Undreamed of, except by a few — The ones with love and peace

In their hearts and minds, those who are the storytellers

Artists, poets, philosophers — Leaders of thought and feeling

Those of gentle soul and also fierce passion for change and progress

Changes

Changes

Looking out my window at the treeline, from past to future

What once was diminished by imbalance and progress

Now lives free and true, a century of uninhibited growth

And flowering — All of the people I loved are gone

Taken by time and circumstance and the promise

Of a better life far away, in the Mega Cities and even beyond Earth

The mistakes of the 20th century have been fixed

Balance between humanity and nature has been restored

My home is a paradise on Earth, and most every change has been good

Yet I can’t help but wish that I could see some of my old friends

Earth Family — Soul mates, especially the ones I dream about

The World of the Future

The World of the Future

 

Advanced technology and more wisdom to go with

The ever changing human spirit, that yet remains

The same essential nature, better than it used to be

Better than things once were overall — The Hero

And Heroine — Come into the world to save us all

Yet we are all heroes, literally and figuratively

 

I awake and it is the future — One hundred years have passed

While I slept — Now I am in a world I barely recognize

Though the landscape remains essentially unchanged

Everything else is different: people, buildings, transportation

Not just in the Mega Cities, but also where I live at the edge

Of the misty mountains and its temperate rainforest

What once was a national park and is now a global one

Still the most diverse collection of communities of life

In the world — An ecosystem held in trust for the future

Generations to come, that have already come, for me

A traveler from the distant past unaware of how I came to be

Here now in the 22nd century of the common era

 

And outside the global park, as well as inside the borders

Free, plentiful, and clean energy available for everyone

The Sun, Wind, Earth, Water, and Cosmic forces of Sky

Harnessed for the benefit of all, with no cost or restriction

For those who use energy for heating, traveling, growing food

Essentially a paradise compared to the past, yet with some problems

Even in Utopia — But no hunger, poverty, or institutional injustice

A global government with local control through democratic means

And different styles of living in the hundreds of Mega Cities

Spread out over Planet Earth, unique yet unified by common interest

Peace and stability, order within the chaos of life and ever-increasing

Knowledge and wisdom about life, the universe, and the cosmos beyond

 

And in our space-time ship that I am lucky enough to have access to

Our first priority is to our home planet, and the stars and planets in our galaxy

And the stars and planets in galaxies beyond our own

Home — In all dimensions, universes, worlds connected

Parallel, alternate, pocket within and yet outside

The physical universe we call home

Even though I can go back to the world I once knew

The time of great transition at the beginning of the 21st century

I am not ready yet — There are so many beautiful and amazing things

Left to see, learn, and do in this new world of the future, yet now present

Between Earth and the Universe of Magic

Between Earth and the Universe of Magic

 

Castle at the edge of Sky — A gateway

To a world with castles floating in Sky

Faery, magical possibility and source

For many strange and wondrous things on Earth

 

And people of the moon and stars

Sharing our Sun, yet in a different dimension

Parallel universe — Connecting to many versions

Of Earth, alternate timelines — Infinite possibilities

 

Peace, Love, and Understanding — Ideals for an optimal real time future

A world that we all share without poverty, hunger, or injustice

An example for the Earth and the World of Faery

Balance and peace in both realms, dimensions bridged by the centers of power

 

Half influenced by Earth, and half by the magical land beyond yet near

The sources of material nature and magic, and the human world’s mythologies

Leaving My Past

Leaving My Past

 

We part as friends, at least not enemies

The crimes I committed to make her happy

Have made us both rich, yet in hiding

From bad people, who do not want me to leave

The life I have lived, my role as a thief

And all-around criminal — No matter how

I justified what I did, I know it was wrong

So now I am trying to make up for lost time

I give Helen half of what I have hidden away

The rest to my family and friends — Atonement

 

She keeps the other treasures I gave her, but I can always

Find more — The quest and journey are half of the prize

Medicine that can heal the world and restore balance

The Message, or one of many — All times and yet only one

Mythic Dreamtime — The ever expansive present moment

 

Echoes of the past and future, all happening now, then

The churning of the cosmic ocean, the ordering of the universe

The birth of stars, our star, planet Earth, the moon

All these things in the stories of our world’s mythologies

Retelling them, we recreate those holy moments, the one moment

Our perspective and perception includes that of the outside looking in

Our beautiful and expanding physical universe of billions of stars

Organized in patterns of eternity — Spirals, circles, fractals

Holographic mandalas within mandalas — Worlds within worlds

Universes of light and darkness, connected yet separate from our own

 

The cosmic ocean of all life, containing all possibilities and universes

Hierarchy of organization bringing order out of chaos and back again

The cosmic drama of eternal conflict, yet also resolution of opposites

The mythic time of coming together between left and right — The Lovers

Only once yet again and again, the eternal moment of initiation

Into the mysteries of the universe and worlds of light and darkness

Beyond our own world — The beauty of nature everywhere, yet nowhere

As sweet as home, wherever we feel our heart to be — Here or there

Planet Earth — A global community of races, species, philosophies

We must work together in a natural way — The way the ancients have left

The many ways that are one, towards one destination and source

The Most Astounding Fact – Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Most Astounding Fact – Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Happy Birthday Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German Novelist, Dramatist, Poet, Humanist, Scientist, and Philosopher (Born August 28, 1749) – Wikiquote

Love does not dominate, it cultivates. And that is more. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~

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Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though ’twere his own.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist, philosopher, and for ten years chief minister of state at Weimar.

See also: Faust, and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the German version of this page.

Contents [hide] 1 Quotes 1.1 Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786-1830) 1.2 Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) 1.3 Roman Elegies (1789) 1.4 Venetian Epigrams (1790) 1.5 Elective Affinities (1808) 1.6 Faust, Part 1 (1808) 1.7 Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) (1821-1829) 1.8 Faust, Part 2 (1832) 1.9 Sprüche in Prosa (Proverbs in Prose, 1819) 2 Attributed 2.1 From the Memoirs of a Superflous Man (1943), Albert Jay Nock 3 Disputed 4 Misattributed 5 External links

[edit] Quotes

• There is strong shadow where there is much light.
  • Götz von Berlichingen, Act I (1773)

• One lives but once in the world.
  • Clavigo, Act I, sc. i (1774)

• […] misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.
  • Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), May 4 (1774–1787)

• If you inquire what the people are like here,
  I must answer, “The same as everywhere!”
  • Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), May 17 (1774–1787)

• Getting along with women,
  Knocking around with men,
  Having more credit than money,
  Thus one goes through the world.
  • Claudine von Villa Bella (1776)

• When young one is confident to be able to build palaces for mankind, but when the time comes one has one’s hands full just to be able to remove their trash.
  • Letter to Johann Kaspar Lavatar (6 March 1780)

• Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
  Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
  Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
  Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.
  • Who rides, so late, through night and wind?
    It is the father with his child.
    He holds the boy in the crook of his arm
    He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.
    • Der Erlkönig (1782)

• Noble be man,
  Helpful and good!
  For that alone
  Sets hims apart
  From every other creature
  On earth.
  • Das Göttliche (The Divine) (1783)

• In der Kunst ist das Beste gut genug.
  • In art the best is good enough.
  • Italian Journey (March 3, 1787)

• A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.
  • Torquato Tasso, Act I, sc. i (1790)

• A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world’s torrent.
  • Torquato Tasso, Act I, sc. ii (1790)

• Untersuchen was ist, und nicht was behagt
  • Investigate what is, and not what pleases.
    • Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt (The Attempt as Mediator of Object and Subject) (1792)

• Die Liebe herrscht nicht, aber sie bildet; und das ist mehr!
  • Love does not dominate, it cultivates. And that is more.
    • Das Märchen (1795), as translated by Hermann J. Weigand in Wisdom and Experience (1949); also translated elsewhere as The Fairy-Tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and simply The Tale]
  • Variant translations:
  • Love does not rule; but it trains, and that is more.
    • As translated by Thomas Carlyle The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1832)
  • Love rules (and reigns) not, but it forms (builds and ‘trains’); and that is more!
    • As quoted in “‘Human Immortalities : The Old and the New” by Thaddeus Burr Wakeman, in The Open Court Vol. XX, No. 1 (January 1906), p. 104

• We can’t form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.
  • Hermann und Dorothea (1797)

• The spirits that I summoned up
  I now can’t rid myself of.
  • Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) (1797)

• One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.
  • Propylaea (1798) Introduction

• The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.
  • Propylaea (1798) Introduction

• In limitations he first shows himself the master,
  And the law can only bring us freedom.
  • Was Wir Bringen (1802)

• One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.
  • Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (December 3, 1812)

• Patriotism ruins history.
  • Conversation with Friedrich Wilhem Riemer (July, 1817).

• Who wants to understand the poem
  Must go to the land of poetry;
  Who wishes to understand the poet
  Must go to the poet’s land.
  • West-östlicher Diwan, motto (1819)

• For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.
  • West-östlicher Diwan, Buch des Paradies (1819)

• Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?
  • Letter to Eckermann (December 30, 1823)

• All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.
  • Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (November 26, 1825)

• One must be something in order to do something.
  • Conversation with Eckermann (October 20, 1828)

• If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses.
  • Letter to Eckermann (February 4, 1829)

• The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it…but the scientist is wiser not to withhold a single finding or a single conjecture from publicity.
  • Essay on Experimentation

• Willst du immer weiterschweifen?
  Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah.
  Lerne nur das Glück ergreifen,
  denn das Glück ist immer da.
  • Do you wish to roam farther and farther?
    See the good that lies so near.
    Just learn how to capture your luck,
    for your luck is always there.
  • Variant translation:
    Do you wish to roam farther and farther?
    See! The Good lies so near.
    Only learn to seize good fortune,
    For good fortune’s always here.
  • Erinnerung

• O’er all the hilltops
  Is quiet now,
  In all the treetops
  Hearest thou
  Hardly a breath;
  The birds are asleep in the trees:
  Wait; soon like these
  Thou too shalt rest.
  • Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s Nightsong)

• Welche Regierung die beste sei? Diejenige, die uns lehrt, uns selbst zu regieren.
  • Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
  • The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe as translated by Bailey Saunders (1893) Maxim 225

• Amerika, du hast es besser—als unser Kontinent, der alte.
  • America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.
  • Wendts Musen-Almanach (1831)

• Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others,
  And in their pleasure takes joy, even as though ’twere his own.
  Not in the morning alone, not only at mid-day he charmeth;
  Even at setting, the sun is still the same glorious planet.
  • “Distichs” in The Poems of Goethe (1853) as translated in the original metres by Edgar Alfred Bowring

• None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
  • Goethe’s Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science and Art (collected from his correspondence), as translated by Otto Wenckstern (1853)

[edit] Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786-1830)

• Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt
  Der in den Zweigen wohnet.
  • I sing as the bird sings
    That lives in the boughs.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 11

• Wer nichts wagt, gerwinnt nichts.
  Wer nie sein Brod mit Tränen ass,
  Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
  Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
  Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.
  • Nothing venture, nothing gain.
    Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate,
    Who ne’er the mournful midnight hours
    Weeping upon his bed has sate,
    He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 13; translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom,
  Where the gold orange glows in the deep thicket’s gloom,
  Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows,
  And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose?
  • Bk. III, Ch. 1

• What’s it to you if I love you?
  • Philine in Bk. IV, Ch. 9
  • Variant translation: If I love you, what business is it of yours?

• One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
  • Bk. V, Ch. 1

• To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence—this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.
  • Bk. VII, Ch. 5

• Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
  • Bk. VII, Ch. 9

• Die Welt ist so leer, wenn man nur Berge, Flüsse und Städte darin denkt, aber hie und da jemand zu wissen, der mit uns übereinstimmt, mit dem wir auch stillschweigend fortleben, das macht uns dieses Erdenrund erst zu einem bewohnten Garten.
  • The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit – this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
  • “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” in Goethes Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1874), p. 520.

[edit] Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787)

• Seeking with the soul the land of the Greeks.
  • Act I, sc. i

• A useless life is an early death.
  • Act I, sc. ii

• One says a lot in vain, refusing;
  The other mainly hears the “No.”
  • Act I, sc. iii

• Pleasure and love are the pinions of great deeds.
  • Act II, sc. i

• Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.
  • Act IV, sc. iv

[edit] Roman Elegies (1789)

• Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces!
  Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb?
  All things are alive in your sacred walls
  Eternal Rome, it’s only for me all is still.
  • Elegy 1

• I’m gazing at church and palace, ruin and column,
  Like a serious man making sensible use of a journey,
  But soon it will happen, and all will be one vast temple,
  Love’s temple, receiving its new initiate.
  Though you’re a whole world, Rome, still, without Love,
  The world isn’t the world, and Rome can’t be Rome.
  • Elegy 1

• Ah, how often I’ve cursed those foolish pages,
  That showed my youthful sufferings to everyone!
  If Werther had been my brother, and I’d killed him,
  His sad ghost could hardly have persecuted me more.
  • Elegy 2 (First version)

• A world without love would be no world.
  • Elegy 2

• Beloved, don’t fret that you gave yourself so quickly!
  Believe me, I don’t think badly or wrongly of you.
  The arrows of Love are various: some scratch us,
  And our hearts suffer for years from their slow poison.
  But others strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points
  Pierce to the marrow, and quickly inflame the blood.
  In the heroic ages, when gods and goddesses loved,
  Desire followed a look, and joy followed desire.
  • Elegy 3

• I feel I’m happily inspired now on Classical soil:
  The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly.
  Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients
  With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight.
  But at night Love keeps me busy another way:
  I become half a scholar but twice as contented.
  And am I not learning, studying the shape
  Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?
  • Elegy 5

[edit] Venetian Epigrams (1790)

• All Nine often used to come to me, I mean the Muses:
  But I ignored them: my girl was in my arms.
  Now I’ve left my sweetheart: and they’ve left me,
  And I roll my eyes, seeking a knife or rope.
  But Heaven is full of gods: You came to aid me:
  Greetings, Boredom, mother of the Muse.
  • Epigram 27

• Is it so big a mystery
  what god and man and world are?
  No! but nobody knows how to solve it
  so the mystery hangs on.
  • As translated by Jerome Rothenberg

• Much there is I can stand. Most things not easy to suffer
  I bear with quiet resolve, just as a God commands it.
  Only a few things I find as repugnant as snakes and poison.
  These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and Christ.
  • Epigram 60.

• Much there is I can stand, and most things not easy to suffer
  I bear with quiet resolve, just as a god commands it.
  Only a few I find as repugnant as snakes and poison —
  These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and †.
  • Variant translation: Lots of things I can stomach. Most of what irks me
    I take in my stride, as a god might command me.
    But four things I hate more than poisons & vipers:
    tobacco smoke, garlic, bedbugs, and Christ.
  • Epigram 67, as translated by Jerome Rothenberg

• Doesn’t surprise me that Christ our Lord
  preferred to live with whores
  & sinners, seeing
  I go in for that myself.
  • As translated by Jerome Rothenberg

[edit] Elective Affinities (1808)

• Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.
  • Bk. I, Ch. 9

• The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.
  • Bk. I, Ch. 9

• One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 2

• The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 3

• Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 4

• No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 4

• None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 5

• A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.
  • Bk. II, Ch. 7

[edit] Faust, Part 1 (1808)

Main article: Goethe’s Faust

• Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren;
  das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren.
  • What dazzles, for the Moment spends its spirit:
    What’s genuine, shall Posterity inherit.
    • Prelude on the Stage

• Das Alter macht nicht kindisch, wie man spricht,
  Es findet uns nur noch als wahre Kinder.
  • Age does not make us childish, as they say.
    It only finds us true children still.
    • Prelude on the Stage

• Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.
  • Man errs as long as he strives.
    • Prologue in Heaven

• Da stehe ich nun, ich armer Thor!
  Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.
  • And here, poor fool! with all my lore
    I stand! no wiser than before.
    • Night, Faust in His Study

• Bin ich ein Gott? Mir wird so licht!
  • Am I a god? I see so clearly!
    • Night, Faust in His Study

• Die Botschaft hör ich wohl, allein, mir fehlt der Glaube
  • The message well I hear, my faith alone is weak
    • Faust’s Study

• Zwey Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.
  • Two souls alas! dwell in my breast.
    • Outside the Gate of the Town

• Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.
  • I am the Spirit that always denies!
    • Faust’s Study

• Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft.
  • Blood is a juice of rarest quality.
  • (Also translated as:) Blood is a very special juice.
    • Faust’s Study

• Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
  Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
  • Dear friend, all theory is gray,
    And green the golden tree of life.
    • Mephistopheles and the Student

• Ein echter deutscher Mann mag keinen Franzen leiden,
  Doch ihre Weine trinkt er gern.
  • A true German can’t stand the French,
    Yet willingly he drinks their wines.
    • Auerbach’s Cellar

• Wer Recht behalten will und hat nur eine Zunge,
  Behält’s gewiß.
  • Whoever intends to have the right, if but his tongue be clever,
    Will have it, certainly.
  • (Sometimes translated as:) He who maintains he’s right—if his the gift of tongues—
    Will have the last word certainly.
    • Faust and Gretchen. A Street

• Meine Ruh’ ist hin,
  Mein Herz ist schwer.
  • My peace is gone,
    My heart is heavy.
    • Gretchen’s Room

• Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.
  • Fair I was also, and that was my ruin.
    • A Prison

• Gut! Ein Mittel, ohne Geld
  Und Arzt und Zauberei zu haben:
  Begib dich gleich hinaus aufs Feld,
  Fang an zu hacken und zu graben,
  Erhalte dich und deinen Sinn
  In einem ganz beschraunken Kreise,
  Ernauhre dich mit ungemischter Speise,
  Leb Mit dem Vieh als Vieh, and acht es nicht fur Raub,
  Den Acker, den du erntest, selbst zu dungen;
  Das ist das beste Mittel, glaub,
  Auf achtzig Jahr dich zu verjungenl
  
  • Good! A method can be used
    without physicians, gold, or magic,
    Go out into the open field
    and start to dig and cultivate;
    keep your body and your spirit
    in a humble and restricted sphere,
    sustain yourself by simple fare,
    live with your herd and spread your own manure
    on land from which you reap your nourishment.
    Believe me, that’s the best procedure
    to keep your youth for eighty years or more.
    
    • A Witch’s Kitchen, Mephistopheles to Faust

[edit] Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) (1821-1829)

• Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden.
  Man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken.
  • All intelligent thoughts have already been thought;
    what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
    • Variant: All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
  • Bk. II, Observations in the Minset of the Wanderer: Art, Ethics, Nature

[edit] Faust, Part 2 (1832)

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Goethe’s Faust. (Discuss)

• Law is mighty, mightier necessity.
  • Act I, A Spacious Hall

• Once a man’s thirty, he’s already old,
  He is indeed as good as dead.
  It’s best to kill him right away.
  • Act II, The Gothic Chamber

• What wise or stupid thing can man conceive
  That was not thought of in ages long ago?
  • Act II, The Gothic Chamber

• I love those who yearn for the impossible.
  • Act II, Classical Walpurgis Night

• The deed is everything, the glory nothing.
  • Act IV, A High Mountain Range

• Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben der täglich sie erobern muss.
  • Of freedom and of life he only is deserving
    Who every day must conquer them anew.
  • Freedom and life are earned by those alone
    Who conquer them each day anew (tr. Walter Kaufmann)
  • Act V, Court of the Palace

• Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
  Den können wir erlösen.
  • Who strives always to the utmost,
    For him there is salvation.
  • Act V, Mountain Gorges

• Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.
  • All perishable is but an allegory
  • Variant translation: All that is transitory is but a metaphor
  • Act V, Chorus mysticus, last sentence, immediately before:

• Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
  • The Eternal Feminine draws us on.
  • Act V, Heaven, last line

[edit] Sprüche in Prosa (Proverbs in Prose, 1819)

• Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

• Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

• Doubt grows with knowledge.

• The greatest happiness for the thinking man is to have fathomed the fathomable, and to quietly revere the unfathomable.

• First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

• A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

• All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

• Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine tätige Unwissenheit.
  • Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

• Of all peoples the Greeks have dreamt the dream of life best.

• Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control over ourselves is harmful.

[edit] Attributed

• The fashion of this world passeth away and I would fain occupy myself with the things that are abiding.
  • Quoted in the Preface to The Works of Francis Rabelais (1931), Albert Jay Nock and Catherine R. Wilson (Eds.)

[edit] From the Memoirs of a Superflous Man (1943), Albert Jay Nock

• Niebuhr was right when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?
  • p. 97

• “As Goethe remarked, all eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective, while in all great eras which have been really in a state of progression, every effort is directed from the inward to the outward world; it is of an objective nature. I have always believed, as Goethe did, that here one comes on a true sense of the term classic.”
  • p. 184

• “Goethe suggested, in the interest of clearness one might very well make a clean sweep of all terms like classic, modernist, realist, naturalist and substitute the simple terms healthy and sickly.”
  • p. 184

• [Those who make the assumption that literacy carries with it the ability to read] do not know what time and trouble it costs to learn to read. I have been working at it for eighteen years, and I can’t say yet that I am completely successful.
  • Goethe at the age of seventy-nine
    • p. 194

• Man will become more clever and sagacious, but not better, happier or showing more resolute wisdom; or at least, only at periods.
  • p. 214

• Was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.
  • That which holds us all in bondage, the common and ignoble.
    • p. 227

• [The next sentence after predicting that great progress is coming:] I foresee the time when God will have no further pleasure in man, but will break up everything for a new creation.
  • p. 273

[edit] Disputed

• If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
  • As quoted in Human Development : A Science of Growth (1961) by Justin Pikunas, p. 311; this might be based on a translation or paraphrase by Viktor Frankl, to whom it is also sometimes attributed.

[edit] Misattributed

• Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.
  • Attributed to Goethe by William Hutchinson Murray, in his book The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951), this has been shown to be a misattribution at “German Myth 12: The Famous ‘Goethe’ Quotation”, Answer.com and “Popular Quotes: Commitment”, Goethe Society of North America

• I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
  I possess tremendous power to make a life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture, or an instrument of inspiration.
  I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de–escalated, and a person humanized or dehumanized.
  
  • Attributed to Goethe, however, the correct/complete quote:

    I have come to a frightening conclusion.

    I am the decisive element in the classroom.

    It is my personal approach that creates the climate.

    It is my daily mood that makes the weather.

    As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.

    I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.

    I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.

    In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis

    will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.

    has been shown to belong to Dr. Haim G. Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers (1972) at “Haim Ginott”, Wikipedia.com and Teacher and Child “Notes from Haim Ginott’s Books”, EQI.org

[edit] External links

• Goethe Extensive Biography – by Worldroots.com
• Weimar Classics Foundation (includes the National Goethe Museum and the Goethe and Schiller Archive)
• Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at Project Gutenberg (English translations and German originals)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works at Projekt Gutenberg-DE (in German)
• Poems of J. W. Goethe as HTML/PDF, Directories, Dictionary (in German)
• Goethe and giving style to one’s character
• Exploratory Experimentation: Goethe, Land, and Color Theory
• Large Image – famous painting of Goethe in high resolution.
• Another famous painting

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We live in a world we ourselves create. ~ Johann Gottfried Herder ~

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Happy Birthday Sri Aurobindo, Indian Nationalist, Scholar, Poet, Mystic, Evolutionary Philosopher, Yogi, and Guru (Born August 15, 1872) – Wikiquote

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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.

Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian nationalist, scholar, poet, mystic, evolutionary philosopher, yogi and guru; born Aravinda Akroyd Ghose

Contents [hide] 1 Sourced 1.1 New Lamps for Old (1893) 1.2 The Uttarpara Address (1909) 1.3 Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913) 1.4 Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17) 1.5 The Renaissance in India (1918) 1.6 Indian Spirituality and Life (1919) 1.7 Savitri (1918 – 1950) 1.7.1 Book One : The Book Of Beginnings 1.7.2 Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds 1.7.3 Book Three : The Book of the Divine Mother 1.8 Lights on Yoga (1935) 1.9 India’s Rebirth 2 Quotes about Aurobindo 3 External links

[edit] Sourced

This Sanatana Dharma has many scriptures: The Veda, the Vedanta, the Gita, the Upanishads, the Darshanas, the Puranas, the Tantras, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran, but its real, the most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has his dwelling.

The colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity.

• 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.
  • Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)

• What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.
  • Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

• 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.
  • Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

• Hinduism, which is the most skeptical and the most believing of all, the most skeptical because it has questioned and experimented the most, the most believing because it has the deepest experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge, that wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of dogmas but a law of life, which is not a social framework but the spirit of a past and future social evolution, which rejects nothing but insists on testing and experiencing everything and when tested and experienced, turning in to the soul’s uses, in this Hinduism, we find the basis of future world religion. This Sanatana Dharma has many scriptures: The Veda, the Vedanta, the Gita, the Upanishads, the Darshanas, the Puranas, the Tantras, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran, but its real, the most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has his dwelling.
  • The Ideal of the Karmayogin (1921), p. 9

The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.

• The Hindu religion appears … as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance — crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.
  • Letters, Vol. II (1949) p. 53; also in The Soul of India (1974) by Satyavrata R Patel

• 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. The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.
  • From an essay in A Defense of Indian Culture, as quoted in The Vision of India (1949) by Sisirkumar Mitra

• More high-reaching, subtle, many-sided, curious and profound than the Greek, more noble and humane than the Roman, more large and spiritual than the old Egyptian, more vast and original than any other Asiatic civilization, more intellectual than the European prior to the 18th century, possessing all that these had and more, it was the most powerful, self-possessed, stimulating and wide in influence of all past human cultures.
  • The Foundations of Indian Culture (1953), p. 31

• 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 Foundations of Indian Culture (1953), p. 147

• To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs; Heine was nearer the mark when he found in Him the divine Aristophanes. God’s laughter is sometimes very coarse and unfit for polite ears; He is not satisfied with being Molière, He must needs also be Aristophanes and Rabelais.
  • Sri Aurobindo : The Hour of God, and Other Writings (1970); variant “To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughed; Heine was nearer the mark when he found in Him the divine Aristophanes” in Mother India (1957)

• There are four great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindaban and the colloquy on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindaban created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanized Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity.
  • On the Bhagavad Gita quoted in “Introduction to the Bhagavad Gita” (1993) by by Paul Molinari

• 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; and only those who do not limit their view to the act and its immediate results, can see how tremendous are its after-effects, how much is eventually destroyed and with that much all the life that depended upon it and fed upon it. Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil, and it is no less destruction even if we personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of violence.
  • “Kurukshetra” in Essays on the Gita (1995), p. 39

• 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…
  • The Upanishads–II : Kena and Other Upanishads (2001), p. 355

[edit] New Lamps for Old (1893)

Originally published as nine articles in the Indu Prakash a Bombay daily newspaper.

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.

• 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.
  • 7 August 1893

• Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
  • 21 August 1893

• I say, of the Congress, then, this — that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; — in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.
  • 28 August 1893

• To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, — while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.
  • 4 December 1893

• Theorist, and trifler though I may be called, I again assert as our first and holiest duty, the elevation and enlightenment of the proletariate: I again call on those nobler spirits among us who are working erroneously, it may be, but with incipient or growing sincerity and nobleness of mind, to divert their strenuous effort from the promotion of narrow class interests, from silly squabbles about offices and salaried positions, from a philanthropy laudable in itself and worthy of rational pursuit, but meagre in the range of its benevolence and ineffectual towards promoting the nearest interests of the nation, into that vaster channel through which alone the healing waters may be conducted to the lips of their ailing and tortured country.
  • 4 December 1893

[edit] The Uttarpara Address (1909)

Uttarpara, India (30 May 1909)

We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatan Dharma, but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived.

About many things in Hinduism I had once been inclined to believe that they were imaginations, that there was much of dream in it, much that was delusion and Maya. But now day after day I realised in the mind, I realised in the heart, I realised in the body the truths of the Hindu religion. They became living experiences to me, and things were opened to me which no material science could explain.

• The year of detention was meant only for a year of seclusion and of training. How could anyone hold me in jail longer than was necessary for God’s purpose? He had given me a word to speak and a work to do, and until that word was spoken I knew that no human power could hush me, until that work was done no human power could stop God’s instrument, however weak that instrument might be or however small. Now that I have come out, even in these few minutes, a word has been suggested to me which I had no wish to speak. The thing I had in my mind He has thrown from it and what I speak is under an impulse and a compulsion.

• I waited day and night for the voice of God within me, to know what He had to say to me, to learn what I had to do. In this seclusion the earliest realisation, the first lesson came to me. I remembered then that a month or more before my arrest, a call had come to me to put aside all activity, to go in seclusion and to look into myself, so that I might enter into closer communion with Him. I was weak and could not accept the call. My work was very dear to me and in the pride of my heart I thought that unless I was there, it would suffer or even fail and cease; therefore I would not leave it. It seemed to me that He spoke to me again and said, “The bonds you had not the strength to break, I have broken for you, because it is not my will nor was it ever my intention that that should continue. I have had another thing for you to do and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.” Then He placed the Gita in my hands. His strength entered into me and I was able to do the sadhana of the Gita. I was not only to understand intellectually but to realise what Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna and what He demands of those who aspire to do His work, to be free from repulsion and desire, to do work for Him without the demand for fruit, to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands, to have an equal heart for high and low, friend and opponent, success and failure, yet not to do His work negligently. I realised what the Hindu religion meant. We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatan Dharma, but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived. This is the Dharma that for the salvation of humanity was cherished in the seclusion of this peninsula from of old. It is to give this religion that India is rising. She does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great.

• I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover. This was the first use of the deeper vision He gave me. I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and as I looked at them I saw Vasudeva, it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.

• I looked and it was not the Magistrate whom I saw, it was Vasudeva, it was Narayana who was sitting there on the bench. I looked at the Prosecuting Counsel and it was not the Counsel for the prosecution that I saw; it was Sri Krishna who sat there, it was my Lover and Friend who sat there and smiled. “Now do you fear?” He said, “I am in all men and I overrule their actions and their words. My protection is still with you and you shall not fear. This case which is brought against you, leave it in my hand. It is not for you. It was not for the trial that I brought you here but for something else. The case itself is only a means for my work and nothing more.”

It is Shakti that has gone forth and entered into the people. Since long ago I have been preparing this uprising and now the time has come and it is I who will lead it to its fulfilment.

• I knew all along what He meant for me, for I heard it again and again, always I listened to the voice within; “I am guiding, therefore fear not. Turn to your own work for which I have brought you to jail and when you come out, remember never to fear, never to hesitate. Remember that it is I who am doing this, not you nor any other. Therefore whatever clouds may come, whatever dangers and sufferings, whatever difficulties, whatever impossibilities, there is nothing impossible, nothing difficult. I am in the nation and its uprising and I am Vasudeva, I am Narayana, and what I will, shall be, not what others will. What I choose to bring about, no human power can stay.”

• You have spoken much today of my self-sacrifice and devotion to my country. I have heard that kind of speech ever since I came out of jail, but I hear it with embarrassment, with something of pain. For I know my weakness, I am a prey to my own faults and backslidings. I was not blind to them before and when they all rose up against me in seclusion, I felt them utterly. I knew them that I the man was a man of weakness, a faulty and imperfect instrument, strong only when a higher strength entered into me. Then I found myself among these young men and in many of them I discovered a mighty courage, a power of self-effacement in comparison with which I was simply nothing. I saw one or two who were not only superior to me in force and character, – very many were that, — but in the promise of that intellectual ability on which I prided myself.

• I had many doubts before. I was brought up in England amongst foreign ideas and an atmosphere entirely foreign. About many things in Hinduism I had once been inclined to believe that they were imaginations, that there was much of dream in it, much that was delusion and Maya. But now day after day I realised in the mind, I realised in the heart, I realised in the body the truths of the Hindu religion. They became living experiences to me, and things were opened to me which no material science could explain.

• 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.

That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose.

• The second message came and it said, “Something has been shown to you in this year of seclusion, something about which you had your doubts and it is the truth of the Hindu religion. It is this religion that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have perfected and developed through the Rishis, saints and Avatars, and now it is going forth to do my work among the nations. I am raising up this nation to send forth my word. This is the Sanatan Dharma, this is the eternal religion which you did not really know before, but which I have now revealed to you. The agnostic and the sceptic in you have been answered, for I have given you proofs within and without you, physical and subjective, which have satisfied you. When you go forth, speak to your nation always this word, that it is for the Sanatan Dharma that they arise, it is for the world and not for themselves that they arise. I am giving them freedom for the service of the world. When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country. I have shown you that I am everywhere and in all men and in all things, that I am in this movement and I am not only working in those who are striving for the country but I am working also in those who oppose them and stand in their path. I am working in everybody and whatever men may think or do, they can do nothing but help in my purpose. They also are doing my work, they are not my enemies but my instruments. In all your actions you are moving forward without knowing which way you move. You mean to do one thing and you do another. You aim at a result and your efforts subserve one that is different or contrary. It is Shakti that has gone forth and entered into the people. Since long ago I have been preparing this uprising and now the time has come and it is I who will lead it to its fulfilment.”

This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish.

• That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being. It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the Lila of Vasudeva. It is the one religion which shows us how we can best play our part in that Lila, its subtlest laws and its noblest rules. It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion, which knows what immortality is and has utterly removed from us the reality of death.

• This is the word that has been put into my mouth to speak to you today. What I intended to speak has been put away from me, and beyond what is given to me I have nothing to say. It is only the word that is put into me that I can speak to you. That word is now finished. I spoke once before with this force in me and I said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish.

[edit] Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913)

Jnana

• There are two allied powers in man; knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit.

• Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.

• Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.

• What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.

• When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellent, but I could no longer find them.

• Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, “What have I to forgive and whom?”

• The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.

• O Thou that lovest, strike! If Thou strike me not now, I shall know that Thou lov’st me not.

• There is no mortality. It is only the Immortal who can die; the mortal could neither be born nor perish. There is nothing finite. It is only the Infinite who can make for Himself limits; the finite can have no beginning nor end, for the very act of conceiving its beginning and end declares its infinity.

• Sin and virtue are a game of resistance we play with God in His efforts to draw us towards perfection. The sense of virtue helps us to cherish our sins in secret.

• A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.

• 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.

• Open thy eyes and see what the world really is and what God; have done with vain and pleasant imaginations.

• Hard is it to be in the world, free, yet living the life of ordinary men; but because it is hard, therefore it must be attempted and accomplished.

• Hatred is the sign of a secret attraction that is eager to flee from itself and furious to deny its own existence. That too is God’s play in His creature.

• 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.

• 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.

• When thou callest another a fool, as thou must, sometimes, yet do not forget that thou thyself hast been the supreme fool in humanity.

• In God’s providence there is no evil, but only good or its preparation.

• Live within; be not shaken by outward happenings.

Karma

• Hate not the oppressor, for, if he is strong, thy hate increases his force of resistance; if he is weak, thy hate was needless.

• Very usually, altruism is only the sublimest form of selfishness.

• Revolutions hew the past to pieces and cast it into a cauldron, but what has emerged is the old Aeson with a new visage.

• Suffer yourself to be tempted within so that you may exhaust in the struggle your downward propensities.

• If thou think defeat is the end of thee, then go not forth to fight, even though thou be the stronger. For Fate is not purchased by any man nor is Power bound over to her possessors. But defeat is not the end, it is only a gate or a beginning.

• I have failed, thou sayest. Say rather that God is circling about towards His object.

• If thy aim be great and thy means small, still act; for by action alone these can increase to thee.

• Care not for time and success. Act out thy part, whether it be to fail or to prosper.

• He who would win high spiritual degrees, must pass endless tests and examinations. But most are anxious only to bribe the examiner.

• 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.

• O Death, our masked friend and maker of opportunities, when thou wouldst open the gate, hesitate not to tell us beforehand; for we are not of those who are shaken by its iron jarring.

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

• When thou findest thyself scorning another, look then at thy own heart and laugh at thy folly.

• Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.

• There are two ways of avoiding the snare of woman; one is to shun all women and the other to love all beings.

• There is nothing small in God’s eyes; let there be nothing small in thine.

• Not result is the purpose of action, but God’s eternal delight in becoming, seeing and doing.

• Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.

• What is vice but an enslaving habit and virtue but a human opinion? See God and do His will; walk in whatever path He shall trace for thy goings.

• Only the soul that is naked and unashamed, can be pure and innocent, even as Adam was in the primal garden of humanity.

• It is easy to distinguish the evil worked by sin and vice, but the trained eye sees also the evil done by self-righteous or self-regarding virtue.

• What is the use of only knowing? I say to thee, Act and be, for therefore God sent thee into this human body.

• What is the use of only being? I say to thee, Become, for therefore wast thou established as a man in this world of matter.

• Mankind has used two powerful weapons to destroy its own powers and enjoyment, wrong indulgence and wrong abstinence.

Bhakti

• 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.

• To commit adultery with God is the perfect experience for which the world was created.

• Even when one has climbed up into those levels of bliss where pain vanishes, it still survives disguised as intolerable ecstasy.

• 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.

• The whole world is my seraglio and every living being and inanimate existence in it is the instrument of my rapture.

• To thy lover, O Lord, the railing of the world is wild honey and the pelting of stones by the mob is summer rain on the body. For is it not Thou that railest and peltest, and is it not Thou in the stones that strikest and hurtest me?

• They say, O my God, that I am mad because I see no fault in Thee; but if I am indeed mad with Thy love, I do not wish to recover my sanity.

• I was much plagued by Satan, until I found that it was God who was tempting me; then the anguish of him passed out of my soul for ever.

• I hated the devil and was sick with his temptations and tortures; and I could not tell why the voice in his departing words was so sweet that when he returned often and offered himself to me, it was with sorrow I refused him. Then I discovered it was Krishna at His tricks and my hate was changed into laughter.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Canst thou see God as the bodiless Infinite and yet love Him as a man loves his mistress? Then has the highest truth of the Infinite been revealed to thee. Canst thou also clothe the Infinite in one secret embraceable body and see Him seated in each and all of these bodies that are visible and sensible? Then has its widest and profoundest truth come also into thy possession.

• 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.

• The strangest of the soul’s experiences is this, that it finds, when it ceases to care for the image and threat of troubles, then the troubles themselves are nowhere to be found in one’s neighbourhood. It is then that we hear from behind those unreal clouds God laughing at us.

• God’s servant is something; God’s slave is greater.

• If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth.

[edit] Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Full text online

The Goal

• When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge. Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.

• When we have passed beyond willings, then we shall have Power. Effort was the helper; Effort is the bar.

• When we have passed beyond enjoyings, then we shall have Bliss. Desire was the helper; Desire is the bar.

• When we have passed beyond individualising, then we shall be real Persons. Ego was the helper; Ego is the bar.

• When we have passed beyond humanity, then we shall be the Man. The Animal was the helper; the Animal is the bar.

• Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal.

• Transform effort into an easy and sovereign overflowing of the soul-strength; let all thyself be conscious force. This is thy goal.

• Transform enjoying into an even and objectless ecstasy; let all thyself be bliss. This is thy goal.

• Transform the divided individual into the world-personality; let all thyself be the divine. This is thy goal.

• Transform the Animal into the Driver of the herds; let all thyself be Krishna. This is thy goal.

• What I cannot do now is the sign of what I shall do hereafter. The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.

• Impossibility is only a sum of greater unrealised possibles. It veils an advanced stage and a yet unaccomplished journey.

• If thou wouldst have humanity advance, buffet all preconceived ideas. Thought thus smitten awakes and becomes creative. Otherwise it rests in a mechanical repetition and mistakes that for its right activity.

• To rotate on its own axis is not the one movement for the human soul. There is also its wheeling round the Sun of an inexhaustible illumination.

• Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act. All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an Idea began to play in divine self-consciousness.

• Thought is not essential to existence nor its cause, but it is an instrument for becoming; I become what I see in myself. All that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be man’s unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells in him.

• Not to go on for ever repeating what man has already done is our work, but to arrive at new realisations and undreamed-of masteries. Time and soul and world are given us for our field, vision and hope and creative imagination stand for our prompters, will and thought and labour are our all-effective instruments.

• What is there new that we have yet to accomplish? Love, for as yet we have only accomplished hatred and self-pleasing; Knowledge, for as yet we have only accomplished error and perception and conceiving; Bliss, for as yet we have only accomplished pleasure and pain and indifference; Power, for as yet we have only accomplished weakness and effort and a defeated victory; Life, for as yet we have only accomplished birth and growth and dying; Unity, for as yet we have only accomplished war and association.

• In a word, godhead; to remake ourselves in the divine image.

The Delight of Being

• What is God after all ? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.

The End

• 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.

• But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending.

• Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.

• 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.

• And what is the middle ? Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labours towards a flood of varied light, pain that travails towards the touch of an unimaginable ecstasy. For all these things are dark figures and perverse vibrations.

• And what is the end of the whole matter ? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe.

The Chain

• 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.

[edit] The Renaissance in India (1918)

First published in Arya (August 1918 – November 1918) Full text online

The physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical…

To attempt to penetrate through the indeterminate confusion of present tendencies and first efforts in order to foresee the exact forms the new creation will take, would be an effort of very doubtful utility.

Part 1

• On the whole what we see is a giant Shakti who awakening into a new world, a new and alien environment, finds herself shackled in all her limbs by a multitude of gross or minute bonds, bonds self-woven by her past, bonds recently imposed from outside, and is struggling to be free from them, to arise and proclaim herself, to cast abroad her spirit and set her seal on the world. We hear on every side a sound of the slow fraying of bonds, here and there a sharp tearing and snapping; but freedom of movement has not yet been attained. The eyes are not yet clear, the bud of the soul has only partly opened. The Titaness has not yet arisen.

• Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it. 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. She was alive to the greatness of material laws and forces; she had a keen eye for the importance of the physical sciences; she knew how to organize the arts of ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does not get its full sense until it stands in right relation to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of the universe could not be explained in the present terms of man or seen by his superficial sight, that there were other powers behind, other powers within man himself of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious only of a small part of himself, that the invisible always surrounds the visible, the supra-sensible the sensible, even as infinity always surrounds the finite. She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, — truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence.
  She saw the myriad gods, and beyond God his own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges of life beyond our present life, ranges of mind beyond our present mind and above these she saw the splendors of the spirit. Then with that calm audacity of her intuition which knew no fear or littleness and shrank from no act whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage, she declared that there was none of these things which man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge; he could conquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit, become a god, become one with God, become the ineffable Brahman.

• The Spirit is a higher infinite of verities; life is a lower infinite of possibilities which seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect, our will, our ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the mediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call down as much — or as little — as may be of the higher powers to stimulate and embellish life.
  But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest intuitions.

Part 2

• Nothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or with things, comes by chance or accident or is really at the mercy of external causes.

Part 3

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.

• To attempt to penetrate through the indeterminate confusion of present tendencies and first efforts in order to foresee the exact forms the new creation will take, would be an effort of very doubtful utility. One might as well try to forecast a harmony from the sounds made by the tuning of the instrument. In one direction or another we may just detect certain decisive indications, but even these are only first indications and we may be quite sure that much lies behind them that will go far beyond anything that they yet suggest. This is true whether in religion and spirituality or thought and science, poetry and art or society and politics. Everywhere there is, at most, only a beginning of beginnings.

• One thing seems at any rate certain, that the spiritual motive will be in the future of India, as in her past, the real originative and dominating strain. By spirituality we do not mean a remote metaphysical mind or the tendency to dream rather than to act. That was not the great India of old in her splendid days of vigour, — whatever certain European critics or interpreters of her culture may say, — and it will not be the India of the future. Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction…

• 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.

• 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, realisation and aspiration. What will finally come out of all this stir and ferment, lies yet in the future.

Part 4

Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion…

• Nor does spirituality mean the moulding of the whole type of the national being to suit the limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular religion, as was often enough attempted by the old societies, an idea which still persists in many minds by the power of old mental habit and association; clearly such an attempt would be impossible, even if it were desirable, in a country full of the most diverse religious opinions and harbouring too three such distinct general forms as Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, to say nothing of the numerous special forms to which each of these has given birth.

• Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.

• Spirit without mind, spirit without body is not the type of man, therefore a human spirituality must not belittle the mind, life or body or hold them of small account: it will rather hold them of high account, of immense importance, precisely because they are the conditions and instruments of the life of the spirit in man.

True spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development.

• Spirituality is not necessarily exclusive; it can be and in its fullness must be all-inclusive.
  But still there is a great difference between the spiritual and the purely material and mental view of existence. The spiritual view holds that the mind, life, body are man’s means and not his aims and even that they are not his last and highest means; it sees them as his outer instrumental self and not his whole being. It sees the infinite behind all things finite and it adjudges the value of the finite by higher infinite values of which they are the imperfect translation and towards which, to a truer expression of them, they are always trying to arrive. It sees a greater reality than the apparent not only behind man and the world, but within man and the world, and this soul, self, divine thing in man it holds to be that in him which is of the highest importance, that which everything else in him must try in whatever way to bring out and express, and this soul, self, divine presence in the world it holds to be that which man has ever to try to see and recognise through all appearances, to unite his thought and life with it and in it to find his unity with his fellows. This alters necessarily our whole normal view of things; even in preserving all the aims of human life, it will give them a different sense and direction.

• India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.

• Perhaps there was too much of religion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to religion the sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all-embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much of religion, but rather too little of it — and in what there was, a too one-sided and therefore an insufficiently ample tendency. The right remedy is, not to belittle still farther the agelong ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in which the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, still more or less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning to turn, and even some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across political and sociological ideals.

[edit] Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)

The highest spirituality indeed moves in a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations and, even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal religious mind is unintelligible.

Originally published in Arya (August – December 1919)Full text online

The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul’s inner experience.

Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing the one Self and Godhead in all.

The main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their broad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya, Lila, divine Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the temple as to the philosopher in his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and the saint in his hermitage.

Chapter 1 (August 1919)

• The highest spirituality indeed moves in a free and wide air far above that lower stage of seeking which is governed by religious form and dogma; it does not easily bear their limitations and, even when it admits, it transcends them; it lives in an experience which to the formal religious mind is unintelligible. But man does not arrive immediately at that highest inner elevation and, if it were demanded from him at once, he would never arrive there. At first he needs lower supports and stages of ascent; he asks for some scaffolding of dogma, worship, image, sign, form, symbol, some indulgence and permission of mixed half-natural motive on which he can stand while he builds up in him the temple of the spirit. Only when the temple is completed, can the supports be removed, the scaffolding disappear. The religious culture which now goes by the name of Hinduism not only fulfilled this purpose, but, unlike certain credal religions, it knew its purpose. It gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the Godward endeavour of the human spirit. An immense many-sided many-staged provision for a spiritual self-building and self-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Sanâtana Dharma. It is only if we have a just and right appreciation of this sense and spirit of Indian religion that we can come to an understanding of the true sense and spirit of Indian culture.

• How can there be a religion which has no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no theological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo distinguishing it from antagonistic or rival religions? How can there be a religion which has no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or congregational system, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory on all its adherents, no one administration and discipline? For the Hindu priests are mere ceremonial officiants without any ecclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere interpreters of the Shastra, not the lawgivers of the religion or its rulers. How again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures? The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that varies in different castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader.

• To the Indian mind the least important part of religion is its dogma; the religious spirit matters, not the theological credo. On the contrary to the Western mind a fixed intellectual belief is the most important part of a cult; it is its core of meaning, it is the thing that distinguishes it from others. For it is its formulated beliefs that make it either a true or a false religion, according as it agrees or does not agree with the credo of its critic. This notion, however foolish and shallow, is a necessary consequence of the Western idea which falsely supposes that intellectual truth is the highest verity and, even, that there is no other. The Indian religious thinker knows that all the highest eternal verities are truths of the spirit. The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul’s inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal.

• The fundamental idea of all Indian religion is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is is a Being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life and body there is a Spirit and Self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme Absolute, originating and supporting all that is transient, a one Eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original and sempiternal Divinity or divine Essence, Consciousness, Force and Bliss is the fount and continent and inhabitant of things.
  Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware Eternity and this conscious Eternal.

• The Infinite alone justifies the existence of the finite and the finite by itself has no entirely separate value or independent existence. Life, if it is not an illusion, is a divine Play, a manifestation of the glory of the Infinite. Or it is a means by which the soul growing in Nature through countless forms and many lives can approach, touch, feel and unite itself through love and knowledge and faith and adoration and a Godward will in works with this transcendent Being and this infinite Existence.
  This Self or this self-existent Being is the one supreme reality, and all things else are either only appearances or only true by dependence upon it. It follows that self-realisation and God-realisation are the great business of the living and thinking human being. All life and thought are in the end a means of progress towards self-realisation and God-realisation.

• Indian religion never considered intellectual or theological conceptions about the supreme Truth to be the one thing of central importance. To pursue that Truth under whatever conception or whatever form, to attain to it by inner experience, to live in it in consciousness, this it held to be the sole thing needful. One school or sect might consider the real self of man to be indivisibly one with the universal Self or the supreme Spirit. Another might regard man as one with the Divine in essence but different from him in Nature. A third might hold God, Nature and the individual soul in man to be three eternally different powers of being. But for all the truth of Self held with equal force; for even to the Indian dualist God is the supreme self and reality in whom and by whom Nature and man live, move and have their being and, if you eliminate God from his view of things, Nature and man would lose for him all their meaning and importance. The Spirit, universal Nature (whether called Maya, Prakriti or Shakti) and the soul in living beings, Jiva, are the three truths which are universally admitted by all the many religious sects and conflicting religious philosophies of India. Universal also is the admission that the discovery of the inner spiritual self in man, the divine soul in him, and some kind of living and uniting contact or absolute unity of the soul in man with God or supreme Self or eternal Brahman is the condition of spiritual perfection. It is open to us to conceive and have experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute and Infinite or to approach and know and feel Him as a transcendent and universal sempiternal Person: but whatever be our way of reaching him, the one important truth of spiritual experience is that he is in the heart and centre of all existence and all existence is in him and to find him is the great self-finding.

• Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing the one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing needful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest spiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian religion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence.

• Nothing can be more untrue than to pretend that the general religious mind of India has not at all grasped the higher spiritual or metaphysical truths of Indian religion. It is a sheer falsehood or a wilful misunderstanding to say that it has lived always in the externals only of rite and creed and shibboleth. On the contrary, the main metaphysical truths of Indian religious philosophy in their broad idea-aspects or in an intensely poetic and dynamic representation have been stamped on the general mind of the people. The ideas of Maya, Lila, divine Immanence are as familiar to the man in the street and the worshipper in the temple as to the philosopher in his seclusion, the monk in his monastery and the saint in his hermitage. The spiritual reality which they reflect, the profound experience to which they point, has permeated the religion, the literature, the art, even the popular religious songs of a whole people.

[edit] Savitri (1918 – 1950)

Full text online

[edit] Book One : The Book Of Beginnings

It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.

Canto One: The Symbol Dawn

• It was the hour before the Gods awake.
  Across the path of the divine Event
  The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
  In her unlit temple of eternity,
  Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.
  Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
  In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
  The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
  A fathomless zero occupied the world.

The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred

• The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
  Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
  A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
  Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
  Something that wished but knew not how to be,
  Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.

• It was as though even in this Nought’s profound,
  Even in this ultimate dissolution’s core,
  There lurked an unremembering entity,
  Survivor of a slain and buried past
  Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
  Reviving in another frustrate world.

One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.

• Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
  A long lone line of hesitating hue
  Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
  Troubled the far rim of life’s obscure sleep.
  Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
  An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
  A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
  It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
  The torpor of a sick and weary world,
  To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
  Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.

• All can be done if the god-touch is there.

• One lucent corner windowing hidden things
  Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.
  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.
  The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
  A glamour from unreached transcendences
  Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
  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.

In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

• An instant’s visitor the godhead shone.
  On life’s thin border awhile the Vision stood
  And bent over earth’s pondering forehead curve.
  Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
  In colour’s hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
  It wrote the lines of a significant myth
  Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
  A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

[edit] Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds

Canto 8 : The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness

• As in a studio of creative Death
  The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan
  The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.
  All who would raise the fallen world must come
  Under the dangerous arches of their power;
  For even the radiant children of the gods
  To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
  None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.

  This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

Canto 11 : The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind

A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
A might looks out, an estranged felicity.

• An errant ray from the immortal Mind
  Accepted the earth’s blindness and became
  Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.
  An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
  Captured and driven in Life’s nescient grasp,
  Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
  It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
  The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
  Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.
  Amidst earth’s mist and fog and mud and stone
  It still remembers its exalted sphere
  And the high city of its splendid birth.

• A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
  A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
  A might looks out, an estranged felicity.
  In glamorous passages of half-veiled light
  Wandering, a brilliant shadow of itself,
  This quick uncertain leader of blind gods,
  This tender of small lamps, this minister serf
  Hired by a mind and body for earth-use
  Forgets its work mid crude realities;
  It recovers its renounced imperial right,
  It wears once more a purple robe of thought
  And knows itself the Ideal’s seer and king,
  Communicant and prophet of the Unborn,
  Heir to delight and immortality.
  All things are real that here are only dreams,
  In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,
  On our unreached heights they reign and come to us
  In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.

[edit] Book Three : The Book of the Divine Mother

Out of the paths of the morning star they came Into the little room of mortal life.

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.

Canto Two : The Adoration of the Divine Mother

• Escape brings not the victory and the crown!

• I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers
  Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
  Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
  Forerunners of a divine multitude,
  Out of the paths of the morning star they came
  Into the little room of mortal life.
  I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
  The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
  The great creators with wide brows of calm,
  The massive barrier-breakers of the world
  And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
  The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
  The messengers of the Incommunicable,
  The architects of immortality.

[edit] Lights on Yoga (1935)

The way of yoga followed here has a different purpose from others…

• The way of yoga followed here has a different purpose from others, — for its aim is not only to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.

[edit] India’s Rebirth

India’s Rebirth : A selection from Sri Aurobindo’s writings, talks and speeches 3rd Edition (2000) Full text online

• 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. And that which must seek now to awake is not an anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident’s success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.
  • Dedication page.

• The deeper we look, the more we shall be convinced that the one thing wanting, which we must strive to acquire before all others, is strength — strength physical, strength mental, strength moral, but above all strength spiritual which is the one inexhaustible and imperishable source of all the others. If we have strength everything else will be added to us easily and naturally.
  • 1905

• If India is to survive, she must be made young again. Rushing and billowing streams of energy must be poured into her; her soul must become, as it was in the old times, like the surges, vast, puissant, calm or turbulent at will, an ocean of action or of force.
  • 1905

We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.

• Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.
  • 1905

• We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again … We need a nucleus of men in whom the Shakti is developed to its uttermost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.
  • 1905

• There are periods in the history of the world when the unseen Power that guides its destinies seems to be filled with a consuming passion for change and a strong impatience of the old. The Great Mother, the Adya Shakti, has resolved to take the nations into Her hand and shape them anew. These are periods of rapid destruction and energetic creation, filled with the sound of cannon and the trampling of armies, the crash of great downfalls, and the turmoil of swift and violent revolutions; the world is thrown into the smelting pot and comes out in a new shape and with new features. They are periods when the wisdom of the wise is confounded and the prudence of the prudent turned into a laughing-stock….
  • 16 April 1907

• It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die. The spirit expresses itself in many ways while itself remaining essentially the same but the body must change to suit its changing environments if it wishes to live. There is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material tests of occupation and birth. By this change it has set itself against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. The spirit of caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us to our present conditions.
  • 22 September 1907

• Whatever plans we may make, we shall find quite useless when the time for action comes. Revolutions are always full of surprises, and whoever thinks he can play chess with a revolution will soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected.
  • 22 February 1908

You say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion.

• There are times of great change, times when old landmarks are being upset, when submerged forces are rising, and just as we deal promptly or linger over the solution of these problems, our progress will be rapid or slow, sound or broken… The problem is put to us one by one, to each nation one by one… He has shown us the possibility of strength within us, and then He has shown us where the danger, the weakness lies. He is pointing out to us how is it that we may become strong. On us it lies … to answer the question which God has put to us, and according as we answer on it depends how this movement will progress, what route it will take, and whether it will lead to a swift and sudden salvation, or whether, after so many centuries of tribulation and sufferings there is still a long period of tribulation and suffering before us. God has put the question to us and with us entirely it lies to answer.
  • 23 June 1909

• There are particular movements in particular epochs in which the Divine Force manifests itself with supreme power shattering all human calculations, making a mock of the prudence of the careful statesman and the scheming politician, falsifying the prognostications of the scientific analyser and advancing with a vehemence and velocity which is obviously the manifestation of a higher than human force. The intellectual man afterwards tries to trace the reasons for the movement and lay bare the forces that made it possible, but at the time he is utterly at fault, his wisdom is falsified at every step and his science serves him not. These are the times when we say God is in the movement, He is its leader and it must fulfil itself however impossible it may be for man to see the means by which it will succeed.
  • 17 July 1909

You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence.

• Terrorism thrives on administrative violence and injustice; that is the only atmosphere in which it can thrive and grow. It sometimes follows the example of indiscriminate violence from above; it sometimes, though very rarely, sets it from below. But the power above which follows the example from below is on the way to committing suicide.
  • 24 July 1909

• You say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, — those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. Hindus and Confucians and Taoists and all others have as much right to enter into relation with God and find the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence. These again are simple truths which are now being recognised all over the world; only the childish in mind or those who vegetate in some formula of the past deny them.
  • 23 October 1929

[edit] Quotes about Aurobindo

• There is certainly nothing in Arabinda Ghose’s past record which would justify exceptional tenderness to him. On the contrary, though he escaped conviction on the actual charge of conspiracy in the Alipore case, yet it is beyond doubt that his influence has been pernicious in the extreme. He is not a mere blind and unreasoning tool, but an active generator of revolutionary sentiment. He is imbued with a semi-religious fanaticism which is a powerful factor in attracting adherents to his cause : and I attribute the spread of seditious doctrines to him personally in a greater degree than to any other single individual in Bengal, or possibly in India.
  • Sir Edward Baker, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, in a letter to Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, 4th Earl of Minto, as quoted in India Under Morley and Minto : Politics Behind Revolution, Repression and Reforms (1964) by Manmath Nath Das

• In my undergraduate days Aurobindo Ghose was easily the most popular leader in Bengal, despite his voluntary exile and absence since 1910. His was a name to conjure with. He had sacrificed a lucrative career in order to devote himself to politics. On the Congress platform he had stood up as a champion of left-wing thought and fearless advocate of independence at a time when most of the leaders, would talk… only of colonial self-government. He had undergone incarceration with perfect equanimity … When I came to Calcutta, in 1913, Aurobindo was already a legendary figure. Rarely have I seen people speak of a leader with such rapturous enthusiasm and many were the anecdotes of this great man, some of them probably true, which travelled from mouth to mouth … his letters would pass rapidly from hand to hand, specially in circles interested in spirituality-cum-politics. In our circle usually somebody would read the letter aloud and the rest of us would enthuse over it … We felt convinced that spiritual enlightenment was necessary for effective national service.
  • Subhas Chandra Bose, a leader of the struggle for India’s independence, President of the Indian National Congress, and founder of the Indian National Army.

• Long after this controversy will be hushed in silence, long after this turmoil, this agitation will have ceased, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone, his words will be echoed and re-echoed, not only in India, but across distant seas and lands.
  • Chittaranjan Das, a counsel for defence in Sri Aurobindo’s 1908 trial in the Alipore bomb case.

• The most dangerous man we have to deal with at present.
  • Lord Minto, Viceroy of India.

• While Tagore awakened the latent music in me, another Indian Sri Aurobindo, brought me to religion. He opened the way to my religious consecration. Indeed my debt to India is very great and is due in part to Tagore and in part to Sri Aurobindo.
  • Gabriela Mistral, Chilean educator, diplomat and writer, awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1945.

• Sri Aurobindo, the Master, the highest of mystics, happily presents the rare phenomenon an exposition clear as a beautiful diamond, without the danger of confounding the layman. This is possible because Sri Aurobindo is a unique synthesis of a scholar, theologian and one who is enlightened…
  • Gabriela Mistral

• Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savitri has already inaugurated the New Age of Illumination and is probably the greatest epic in the English language… The most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute.
  • Dr. Raymond Piper, Profesor of Philosophy at Syracuse University

• Sri Aurobindo is one of the greatest thinkers of Modern India … the most complete synthesis achieved upto the present between the genius of the West and the East… The last of the great Rishis holds in his outstretched hands, the bow of Creative Inspiration.
  • Romain Rolland French writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915

• From a scientific and philosophical standpoint the works of Sri Aurobindo are a sound antidote to the pseudo-scientific psychology and psychiatry and educational art of the West. Sri Aurobindo’s `The Life Divine’ and Yoga treatises are among the most important works of our times in philosophy, ethics and humanities. Sri Aurobindo himself is one of the greatest living sages of our time, the most eminent moral leader.
  • Pithrim Sorokin, Russian sociologist, Professor of Sociology at the University of Leningrad, and later at Minnesota and Harvard.

• At the very first sight I could realise he had been seeking for the Soul and had gained it, and through this long process of realisation had accumulated within him a silent power of inspiration. His face was radiant with an inner light…
  • Rabindranath Tagore

• I felt the utterance of the ancient Hindu Rishis spoke from him of that equanimity which gives the human Soul its freedom of entrance into the All. I said to him, “You have the word and we are waiting to accept it from you. India will speak through your voice to the world, Hearken to me … O Aurobindo, accept the salutations from Rabindranath.”
  • Rabindranath Tagore

• As in the past China was spiritually conquered by a great Indian, so in the future too she would be conquered by another great Indian, Sri Aurobindo, the Maha-Yogi who, “is the bringer of that light which will chase away the darkness that envelops the world to-day.”
  • Tan Yun-Shan, Director of Chinese studies at Visva-Bharati University, China’s cultural Ambassador to India in 1939.

• Of all modern Indian writers Aurobindo — successively poet, critic, scholar, thinker, nationalist, humanist — is the most significant and perhaps the most interesting … In fact, he is a new type of thinker, one who combines in his vision the alacrity of the West with the illumination of the East. To study his writings is to enlarge the boundaries of one’s knowledge … He is blessed with a keen intuition. He knows that a man may be right and not wise. He treats each word of his as though it were a drop of elixir. In all this he is unique — at least in modern India. … a yogi who writes as though he were standing among the stars, with the constellations for his companions.
  • Review of Collected Poems and Plays in the Times Literary Supplement [London] (8 July 1944)

• Sri Aurobindo is no visionary. He has always acted his dreams … So from individual self-discipline he has gone to the life of humanity. The Psychology of Social Development, Ideals and Progress and The Ideal of Human Unity should be carefully considered by all those who are busy preparing blue-prints for the future.
  • Times Literary Supplement [London]

[edit] External links

• Brief biography and selected texts at CosmicHarmony.com
• Brief biography at Kheper.net
• Brief biography at WriteSpirit.net
• Complete Text of Savitri and Commentaries
• Sri Aurobindo on the Vedas
• Sri Aurobindo on the Upanishads
• Online texts at motherservice.org
• The Sri Aurobindo Society in Pondicherry, India
• Sri Aurobindo at Aurobindo.net
• Teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother
• The Mother and Sri Aurobindo at Searchforlight.org
• Lotus Press U.S. publisher Sri Aurobindo’s writings
• Quotes and pictures
• Sri Aurobindo and spiritual evolution
• “The Relevance of Aurobindo:Political Life & Teachings” (1985) by Nadesan Satyendra
• “Tantra and Transcendentalism – The Philosophies of Emerson and Aurobindo” (2002) by Robert C. Gordon
• Indian Railways Information

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Categories: Philosophers | Indian poets | Hindu gurus | 1950s deaths

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Happy Birthday John Galsworthy, Novelist and Playwright (Born August 14, 1867) – Wikiquote

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If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.

John Galsworthy OM (14 August 1867 – 31 January 1933) was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1932.

Contents [hide] 1 Quotes 1.1 Vague Thoughts On Art (1911) 1.2 Moods, Songs and Doggerels (1912) 1.3 Over the River (1933) 2 External links

[edit] Quotes

They did not stop to love each other in this life; they were so sure they had all eternity to do it in. The doctrine was an invention to enable men to act like dogs with clear consciences. Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.

It isn’t enough to love people because they’re good to you, or because in some way or other you’re going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.

It’s always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it’s going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.

The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.

Truth, to the human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.

• The world’s a fine place for those who go out to take it; there’s lots of unknown stuff’ in it yet. I’ll fill your lap, my pretty, so full of treasures that you shan’t know yourself. A man wasn’t meant to sit at home…
  • A Man of Devon (1901)

• The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and — the sniff. Danger — so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual — was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.
  • The Man of Property (1906) Volume I of The Forsyte Saga

• “To take life,” went on the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, “was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows of the human race. … They did not stop to love each other in this life; they were so sure they had all eternity to do it in. The doctrine was an invention to enable men to act like dogs with clear consciences. Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.”
  • Fraternity (1909)

• Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.
  • Justice, Act II (1910)

• When Man evolved Pity, he did a queer thing — deprived himself of the power of living life as it is without wishing it to become something different.
  • Letter to Thomas Hardy (27 March 1910)

• Life was to be lived — not torpidly dozed through in this queer cultured place, where age was in the blood! Life was for love — to be enjoyed!
  • The Dark Flower (1913)

• It isn’t enough to love people because they’re good to you, or because in some way or other you’re going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.
  • A Bit O’ Love (1915)

• Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes and voices of other men — all this was precious to her beyond everything.
  • Beyond (1917)

• Love! Beyond measure — beyond death — it nearly kills. But one wouldn’t have been without it.
  • Beyond (1917)

• Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.
  • Saint’s Progress (1919)

• “I cannot explain. There are things that I can’t make clear, because you are wilfully blind to all that I believe in. For what do you imagine we are fighting this great war, if it is not to reestablish the belief in love as the guiding principle of life?”
  Laird shook his head. “We are fighting to redress a balance, which was in danger of being lost.”
  “The balance of power?”
  “Heavens! — no! The balance of philosophy.”
  Pierson smiled. “That sounds very clever, George; but again, I don’t follow you.”
  “The balance between the sayings: ‘Might is Right,’ and ‘Right is Might.’ They’re both half-truth, but the first was beating the other out of the field. All the rest of it is cant, you know. And by the way, sir, your Church is solid for punishment of the evildoer. Where’s mercy there? Either its God is not merciful, or else it doesn’t believe in its God.
  • Saint’s Progress (1919)

• Summer — summer — summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!
  • Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918)

• I don’t know much about morality and that, but there is this: It’s always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it’s going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary.
  • In Chancery (1920); Third part of The Forsyte Saga

• Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.
  • Windows, Act I (1922)

• The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.
  • Windows, Act II (1922)

• Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art. And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this doubting phrase “Could we recapture the zest of that old time?”
  I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so — the rest is silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged muteness which is the lot of advancing years.
  Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though essentially relative, like Einstein’s theory, will never lose its ever-new and unique quality — perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
  • Preface to Villa Rubein and Other Stories (1923)

• Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one’s work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one’s readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.
  • Preface to Villa Rubein and Other Stories (1923)

• If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.
  • Swan Song (1928) Pt. II, Ch. 6

• A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
  • Maid in Waiting (1931), Ch. 3

• There’s just one rule for politicians all over the world: Don’t say in Power what you say in Opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.
  • Maid in Waiting (1931), Ch. 7

• One’s eyes are what one is, one’s mouth what one becomes.
  • Flowering Wilderness (1932), Ch. 2

[edit] Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)

Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion.

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal.

Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself; you may take it, or you may leave it.

We have begun, in fact, to have a glimmering of the artist’s creed, that nothing may we despise or neglect — that everything is worth the doing well, the making fair — that our God, Perfection, is implicit everywhere, and the revelation of Him the business of our Art.

• Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an hypothecated perfect human being.

• I paused, watching the swallows; for they seemed to me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all daring and balance and surprise, of the delicate poise and motion of Art, that visits no two men alike, in a world where no two things of all the things there be, are quite the same.

• Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute’s profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement. The active amusements and relaxations of life can only rest certain of our faculties, by indulging others; the whole self is never rested save through that unconsciousness of self, which comes through rapt contemplation of Nature or of Art.

• Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself; you may take it, or you may leave it. It does not force itself rudely where it is not wanted. It is reverent to all tempers, to all points of view. But it is wilful — the very wind in the comings and goings of its influence, an uncapturable fugitive, visiting our hearts at vagrant, sweet moments; since we often stand even before the greatest works of Art without being able quite to lose ourselves! That restful oblivion comes, we never quite know when — and it is gone! But when it comes, it is a spirit hovering with cool wings, blessing us from least to greatest, according to our powers; a spirit deathless and varied as human life itself.

• I cannot help thinking that historians, looking back from the far future, will record this age as the Third Renaissance. We who are lost in it, working or looking on, can neither tell what we are doing, nor where standing; but we cannot help observing, that, just as in the Greek Renaissance, worn-out Pagan orthodoxy was penetrated by new philosophy; just as in the Italian Renaissance, Pagan philosophy, reasserting itself, fertilised again an already too inbred Christian creed; so now Orthodoxy fertilised by Science is producing a fresh and fuller conception of life — a love of Perfection, not for hope of reward, not for fear of punishment, but for Perfection’s sake. Slowly, under our feet, beneath our consciousness, is forming that new philosophy, and it is in times of new philosophies that Art, itself in essence always a discovery, must flourish. Those whose sacred suns and moons are ever in the past, tell us that our Art is going to the dogs; and it is, indeed, true that we are in confusion! The waters are broken, and every nerve and sinew of the artist is strained to discover his own safety. It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time being made.

• Perfection, cosmically, was nothing but perfect Equanimity and Harmony; and in human relations, nothing but perfect Love and Justice. And Perfection began to glow before the eyes of the Western world like a new star, whose light touched with glamour all things as they came forth from Mystery, till to Mystery they were ready to return.
  This — I thought is surely what the Western world has dimly been rediscovering. There has crept into our minds once more the feeling that the Universe is all of a piece, Equipoise supreme; and all things equally wonderful, and mysterious, and valuable. We have begun, in fact, to have a glimmering of the artist’s creed, that nothing may we despise or neglect — that everything is worth the doing well, the making fair — that our God, Perfection, is implicit everywhere, and the revelation of Him the business of our Art.

• Is not the training of an artist a training in the due relation of one thing with another, and in the faculty of expressing that relation clearly; and, even more, a training in the faculty of disengaging from self the very essence of self — and passing that essence into other selves by so delicate means that none shall see how it is done, yet be insensibly unified? Is not the artist, of all men, foe and nullifier of partisanship and parochialism, of distortions and extravagance, the discoverer of that jack-o’-lantern — Truth; for, if Truth be not Spiritual Proportion I know not what it is. Truth it seems to me — is no absolute thing, but always relative, the essential symmetry in the varying relationships of life; and the most perfect truth is but the concrete expression of the most penetrating vision. Life seen throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually selected — that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound by dogma. Truth admits but the one rule: No deficiency, and no excess! Disobedient to that rule — nothing attains full vitality. And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of vital things.

• Only out of stir and change is born new salvation. To deny that is to deny belief in man, to turn our backs on courage! It is well, indeed, that some should live in closed studies with the paintings and the books of yesterday — such devoted students serve Art in their own way. But the fresh-air world will ever want new forms. We shall not get them without faith enough to risk the old! The good will live, the bad will die; and tomorrow only can tell us which is which!

• The seeing of things as they really are — the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the power of expression), is what makes a man an artist. What makes him a great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative, instead of a comparative, clarity of vision.

• What is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature’s own, to fashion something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties with which Nature has endowed us? The qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all.

• Men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can be stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first be satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that work of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is drawn from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the romantic artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome either kind, so long as it is good enough.

• He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste. No realist can love romantic Art so much as he loves his own, but when that Art fulfils the laws of its peculiar being, if he would be no blind partisan, he must admit it. The romanticist will never be amused by realism, but let him not for that reason be so parochial as to think that realism, when it achieves vitality, is not Art. For what is Art but the perfected expression of self in contact with the world; and whether that self be of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is of no moment whatsoever. The tossing of abuse from realist to romanticist and back is but the sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind side turned toward each other. Shall not each attempt be judged on its own merits? If found not shoddy, faked, or forced, but true to itself, true to its conceiving mood, and fair-proportioned part to whole; so that it lives — then, realistic or romantic, in the name of Fairness let it pass! Of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms. Shall we waste breath and ink in condemnation of artists, because their temperaments are not our own?

• I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And there came to me this thought: What is this Universe — that never had beginning and will never have an end — but a myriad striving to perfect pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that all form one great perfected picture? And what are we — ripples on the tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose — but little works of Art?

[edit] Moods, Songs and Doggerels (1912)

Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky!

Raise up the banner of forlorn defence — A jest to the complacency of crowds — Bright-haloed with the one diviner sense: To hold itself as nothing to itself; And in the quest of its imagined star To lose all thought of after-recompense!

• Come! Let us lay a lance in rest,
  And tilt at windmills under a wild sky!
  For who would live so petty and unblest
  That dare not tilt at something ere he die;
  Rather than, screened by safe majority,
  Preserve his little life to little end,
  And never raise a rebel cry!
  • Errantry, St. 1, Moods, Songs and Doggerels (1912)

• God save the pennon, ragged to the dawn,
  That signs to moon to stand, and sun to fly;
  And flutters when the weak is overborne
  To stem the tide of fate and certainty.
  That knows not reason, and that seeks no fame —

  So! Undismayed beneath the serried clouds,
  Raise up the banner of forlorn defence —
  A jest to the complacency of crowds —
  Bright-haloed with the one diviner sense:
  To hold itself as nothing to itself;
  And in the quest of its imagined star
  To lose all thought of after-recompense!

  • Errantry, St. 4 – 5,

[edit] Over the River (1933)

text online

How to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.

• The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.
  • Ch. 1

• Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place — service — social service — the ants’ creed, the bees’ creed.
  • Ch. 11

• Everything known before it happens; and headlines twice the size of the events.
  • Ch. 27

• How to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about.
  • Ch. 39

[edit] External links

• Works by John Galsworthy at Project Gutenberg

Retrieved from “http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Galsworthy“

Categories: Nobel Prize winners | Novelists | Playwrights | English poets | 1930s deaths

 

via en.wikiquote.org

 

‘It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live ….’ – Felix Adler (1851-08-13 – 1933-04-24) | Wikiquote

It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone. ~ Felix Adler ~

via en.wikiquote.org

Hard to argue against that.