Rabindranath Tagore

মুখের পানে চাহিনু অনিমেষে,
বাজিল বুকে সুখের মত ব্যথা।

I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free.
But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.

...the authors he has himself discovered are his own exclusive territory, like the saloon compartment of a special train.

The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

Your lips are bitter-sweet with the taste of my wine of pain.

The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love

Strong Mercy:

My desires are many and my cry is pitiful,
but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals;
and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple,
great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked — -this sky and the light, this body and the
life and the mind — -saving me from perils of overmuch desire.

There are times when I languidly linger
and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal;
but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by
refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.

Poems On Life:

Life is given to us,
we earn it by giving it.

Let the dead have the immortality of fame,
but the living the immortality of love.

Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty
that can modulate their isolation into a
harmony with the whole.

Life, like a child, laughs,
shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

The Stronger is the imagination the less imaginary it is

I have read in books that we are called 'caged birds'. I cannot speak for others, but I had so much in this cage of mine that there was not room for it in the universe- at least that is what I then felt.

To try to give our infatuation a higher place than Truth is a sign of inherent slavishness. Where our minds are free we find ourselves lost. Our moribund vitality must have for its rider either some fantasy, or someone in authority, or a sanction from the pundits, in order to make it move. So long as we are
impervious to truth and have to be moved by some hypnotic stimulus, we must know that we lack the capacity for self- government. Whatever may be our condition, we shall either need some imaginary ghost or some actual medicine-man to terrorize over us.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

I AM RESTLESS

AM restless. I am athirst for far-away things.
My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.
O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.

I am eager and wakeful, I am a stranger in a strange land.
Thy breath comes to me whispering an impossible hope.
Thy tongue is known to my heart as its very own.
O Far-to-seek, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that I know not the way, that I have not the winged horse.

I am listless, I am a wanderer in my heart.
In the sunny haze of the languid hours, what vast vision of thine takes shape in the blue of the sky!
O Farthest end, O the keen call of thy flute!
I forget, I ever forget, that the gates are shut everywhere in the house where I dwell alone!