"Our passions and desires are unruly, but our character subdues these elements into a harmonious whole. Does something similar to this happen in the physical world? Are the elements rebellious, dynamic with individual impulse? And is there a principle in the physical world which dominates them and puts them into an orderly organization? … It is the constant harmony of chance and determination which makes it eternally new and living."

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

"The one without second is emptiness, the other one makes it true."

"Light finds her treasure of colours through the antagonism of clouds."

"I touch God in my song as the hill touched the far-away sea with its waterfall."

"While God waits for his temple to be built of love, men bring stones."

"Jewel-Like the immortal does not boast of its length of years but of the scintillating point of the moment."

"The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time, unobscured by the dust of history."

"God seeks comrades and claims love, the Devil seeks slaves and claims obedience."

"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand With a grip that kills it.Wishing to hearten a timid lamp great night lights all her stars."

"Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years."

"In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight."

"O Woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their own hearts … You are one-half woman and one-half dream."

"The wise man warns me that life is but a dewdrop on the lotus leaf."

"To the guests that must go, bid God's speed and brush away all traces of their steps."

"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf."

"My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes."

"Please is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs it dies. But sorrow is strong and abiding. Let sorrowful love wake in your eyes."

"We do not stray out of all words into the ever silent; We do not raise our hands to the void for things beyond hope."

"I am restless. I am athirst for faraway 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."

"Ah me, why did they build my house by the road to the market town?"

"It is widely known in India that there are individuals who have the power to attain temporarily the state of Samadhi, the complete merging of the self in the infinite, a state which is indescribable. While accepting their testimony as true, let us at the same time have faith in the testimony of others who have felt a profound love, which is the intense feeling of union, for a Being who comprehends in himself all things that are human in knowledge, will and action."

"The tendency of the Indian mind has ever been towards that transcendentalism which does not hold religion to be ultimate but rather to be a means to a further end. This end consists in the perfect liberation of the individual in the universal spirit across the furthest limits of humanity itself."

"There is no external means of taking freedom by the throat. It is the inward process of losing ourselves that leads to it. Bondage in all its forms has its stronghold in the inner self and not in the outside world; it is in the dimming of our consciousness, in the narrowing of our perspective, in the wrong valuation of things."

"I was born in what was once the metropolis of British India. My own ancestors came floating to Calcutta upon the earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East India Company. The unconventional code of life for our family has been a confluence of three cultures, the Hindu, Mohammedan and British."

"Our village poet sings: “Man will brightly flash into your sight, my heart, if you shut the door of desires.” We have seen how primitive man was occupied with his physical needs, and thus restricted himself to the present which is the time boundary of the animal; and he missed the urge of his consciousness to seek its emancipation in a world of ultimate human value."

"It is for dignity of being that we aspire through the expansion of our consciousness in a great reality of Man to which we belong. We realize it through admiration and love, through hope that soars beyond the actual, beyond our own span of life into an endless time wherein we live the life of all men."

"The most important of all outstanding facts of Iranian history is the religious reform brought about by Zarathustra. There can be hardly any question that he was the first man we know who gave a definitely moral character and direction to religion and at the same time preached the doctrine of monotheism which offered an eternal foundation of reality to goodness as an ideal of perfection."

"The development of intelligence and physical power is equally necessary in animals and men for their purposes of living; but what is unique in man is the development of his consciousness which gradually deepens and widens the realization of his immortal being, the perfect, the eternal."

"We have our eyes, which relate to us the vision of the physical universe. We have also an inner faculty of our own which helps us to find our relationship with the supreme self of man, the universe of personality. This faculty is our luminous imagination, which in its higher stage is special to man.Tf offers us that vision of wholeness which for the biological necessity of physical survival is superfluous ; its purpose is to arouse in us the sense of perfection which is our true sense of immortality."

"Source: *Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore* (1968) quoting Tagore"

"You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water."

"Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love."

"Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky."

"When I stand before thee at the day's end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing."

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

"WE live in this world when we love it."

"Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down."

"Do not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name."

"Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself."

"The fountain of death makes the still water of life play."

"Men are cruel, but Man is kind."

"Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn."

"Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it."

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."

"He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good."

"The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence."

"When we rejoice in our fulness, then we can part with our fruits with joy."

"Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth."

"The roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful."