Love is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in exchange. ...Physical life does not desire to give itself, it desires only to receive. ...Love at first obeys the law of hunger and enjoys the receiving and the exacting from others rather than the giving and surrendering to others which it admits chiefly as a necessary price for the thing that it desires Its true law is to establish an equal commerce in which the joy of giving is equal to the joy of receiving and tends in the end to become even greater; but that is when it is shooting beyond itself under the pressure of the psychic flame to attain to the fulfilment of utter unity and has therefore to realise that which seemed to it not-self as an even greater and dearer self than its own individuality.

                        SRI AUROBINDO, The Life Divine, I, ch. XXI
                                

Men's way of doing things well is through a clear mental connection; they see things and do things with the mind and what they want is a mental and human perfection. When they think of a manifestation of Divinity, they think it must be an extraordinary perfection in doing ordinary human things-an extraordinary business faculty, political, poetic or artistic faculty, an accurate memory , not making mistakes, not undergoing any defect or failure. Or else they think of things which they call superhuman like not eating food or telling cotton-futures or sleeping on nails or eating them [one could add many other things, such as curing diseases or making pass an examination successfully. Pavitra.] All that has nothing to do with manifesting the Divine. ...These human ideas are false.
  The Divinity acts according to another consciousness, the consciousness of the Truth above and the Lila below and It acts according to the need of the Lila, not according to man's ideas of what It should or should not do. This is the first thing one must grasp, otherwise one can understand nothing about the manifestation of the Divine.