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Adventure
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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.
-Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, 1915
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You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Adversity
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I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Art
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What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Children
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The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps
-Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 1912
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Freedom
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We gain freedom when we have paid the full price...
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Generosity
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All that is not given is lost.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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God
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Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Humility
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We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Laughter
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The burden of the self is lightened with I laugh at myself.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Life
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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.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Logic
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A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Love
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We live in the world when we love it.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Love's overbrimming mystery joins death and life. It has filled my cup of pain with joy.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Money
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The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, molding them into money.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Prejudice
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Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Reading
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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.
-Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, 1915
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Service
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I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Society
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No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Spirituality
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The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination.
-Rabindranath Tagore, English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Volume 5
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Sunset
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Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Time
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The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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Trees
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Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
-Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928
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Books by and about Rabindranath Tagore