Ideas and Opinions

On India (Bharat's) Relevance to the World:

"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."

On Thought-Phobia

Thought-Phobia: "the chief cause of the weakness of India is not subjection nor poverty, nor the lack of spirituality or dharma [ethics] but the decline of thought-power, the growth of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see inability or unwillingness to think - thought-incapacity or thought-phobia." (in a letter to his brother Barindra in 1920).

On India's Road to Modernity

"The recovery of the old spiritual knowledge & experience in all its splendor, depth & fullness is its first, most essential work; the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature, art, science & critical knowledge is the second; an original dealing with modern problems in the light of the Indian spirit & the endeavor to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualized society is the third & most difficult. Its success on these 3 lines will be the measure of its help to the future of humanity". 

Sri Aurobindo

"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization."

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play."

"It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the 

most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some

more ambitious goal beyond it."

Arnold Toynbee

"When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only 

what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out.Never let yourself be

 diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent

 social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is

 the intellectual thing that I should wish to say."

Bertrand Russell

" I will look upon endless existence as a curse as did the Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew. 

Death is life's greatest invention perpetuating the worn with the new."

Will Durant