Rabindranath Tagore

“A fancy comes to me--that desire can never attain its object--it need never attain it.”

“When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings, - therefore he knows not himself.”

“The winds of grace are blowing all the time, but it is you that must raise your sails.”

“Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not.”

“It was the Kojagar full moon, and I was slowly pacing the riverside conversing with myself. It could hardly be called a conversation, as I was doing all the talking and my imaginary companion all the listening. The poor fellow had no chance of speaking up for himself, for was not mine the power to compel him helplessly to answer like a fool?But what a night it was! How often have I tried to write of such, but never got it done! There was not a line of ripple on the river; and from away over there, where the farthest shore of the distant main stream is seen beyond the other edge of the midway belt of sand, right up to this shore, glimmers a broad band of moonlight. Not a human being, not a boat in sight; not a tree, nor blade of grass on the fresh-formed island sand-bank.It seemed as though a desolate moon was rising upon a devastated earth; a random river wandering through a lifeless solitude; a long-drawn fairy-tale coming to a close over a deserted world,—all the kings and the princesses, their ministers and friends and their golden castles vanished, leaving the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers and the Unending Moor, over which the adventurous princes fared forth, wanly gleaming in the pale moonlight. I was pacing up and down like the last pulse-beats of this dying world. Every one else seemed to be on the opposite shore—the shore of life—where the British Government and the Nineteenth Century hold sway, and tea and cigarettes.”

“Unending LoveI seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...In life after life, in age after age, forever.My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,In life after life, in age after age, forever.Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,It's ancient tale of being apart or together.As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.You become an image of what is remembered forever.You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.At the heart of time, love of one for another.We have played along side millions of lovers,Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,the distressful tears of farewell,Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in youThe love of all man's days both past and forever:Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -And the songs of every poet past and forever.”

“Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.”

“Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.”

“When at last we have to die it will be time enough to get cold.While we are on fire let us seethe and boil.”

“Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.”

“I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature—calm, passive, silent, unfathomable,—and our own everyday worries—paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!”

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

“Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.”

“From the solemn gloom of the temple children run out to sit in the dust, God watches them play and forgets the priest.”

“His love for me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than foe receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jars kept in the drawing-room.”

“Read books when you are free, read minds when you are'nt....but do read...”

“To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.”

“The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition”

“You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”

“The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.”