In order to explain why the ordinary Sadhus and Yogis take to tobacco and gānja [an intoxicant], I said that these cause stimulation of the physical brain. But these have reactions. And to stimulate the brain thus is not the proper process.
A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away
You carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realization perfect. If you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use the one to realize the other.
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
The highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the door of the spirit.
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.
What sort of politics you people do? Such is the way of all parliaments: one can sense even beforehand the trend of voting, in which direction it will turn.
An aimless life is always a troubled life. Every individual should have an aim. But do not forget that the quality of your aim will depend the quality of your life. Your aim should be high and wide, generous and disinterested; this will make your life precious to yourself and to others. Whatever your ideal, it cannot be perfectly realized unless you have realized perfection in yourself.
Remember that you are at an exceptional hour in a unique epoch, that you have this great happiness, this invaluable privilege, of being present at the birth of a new world.
The Truth-power must be brought down from above into that state of peace, and this higher power - Parashakti - will directly guide the vehicle - ādhāra - and transform it.
The navel region is the centre of the vital. It is from here that the movements of the vital rise upward. Above the navel and behind the chest is the centre of the play of emotions and below this takes place the play of the physical. Mulādhāra is the base of the physical. In between the Mulādhāra and the navel, there is another centre of the vital.
As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.
A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way.
Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality..... To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits.