Rabindranath Tagore

“I cannot choose the best. The best chooses me.”

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

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

“By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower.”

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

“Let me think that there is one among those stars that guides my life through the dark unknown.”

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”

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

“Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”

“Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action — into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

“I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark?”

“What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.”

“Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.”

“Sorrow is hushed into peace in my heart like the evening among the silent trees.”

“Gratefulness is the music of the heart, when its chords are swept by the breeze of kindness.”

“I have on my table a violin string. It is free. I twist one end of it and it responds. It is free. But it is not free to do what a violin string is supposed to do — to produce music. So I take it, fix it in my violin and tighten it until it is taut. Only then is it free to be a violin string.”

“The sands in your way beg for your song and your movement, dancing water. Will you carry the burden of their lameness?”

“The mighty desert is burning for the love of a blade of grass who shakes her head and laughs and flies away.”

“Let my country awake.”