About Love...

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

We never can have a true view of man unless we have a love for him. Civilization must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity. The first question and the last which it has to answer is whether and how far it recognizes man more as a spirit than a machine? Whenever some ancient civilization fell into decay and died, it was owing to causes which produced callousness of heart and led to the cheapening of man's worth; when either the state or some powerful group of men began to look upon the people as a mere instrument of their power; when, by compelling weaker races to slavery and trying to keep them down by every means, man struck at the foundation of his greatness, his own love of freedom and fair-play. Civilization can never sustain itself upon cannibalism of any form. For that by which alone man is true can only be nourished by love and justice.

* If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

* Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.

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

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

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

* 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.

* 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.

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

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

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

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

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

* 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.

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

* 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.

* Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the universal being; truth the perfect comprehension of the universal mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness— how, otherwise, can we know truth?

* Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

* If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars

* If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

Variant: If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

* In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.

* In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest... Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love, for love is most free and at the same time most bound.

* In love, at one of its poles you find the personal, at the other the impersonal. At one you have the positive assertion— Here I am; at the other the equally strong denial— I am not. Without this ego what is love? And again, with only this ego how can love be possible?