I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold,
service was
joy.
~
He who wants to do good knocks at the gate;
he who loves finds the gate open.
~
I have spent my days stringing
and unstringing my instrument
while the song I came to sing
remains unsung.

Stillness soars as a mountain peak,
Seeking its greatness in height.
Movement stops in a silent lake,
Seeking in depth its limit.
~
The fish in the water is silent,
the animals on the earth is noisy,
the bird in the air is singing.
But man has in him the silence of the sea,
the noise of the earth
and the music of the air.
~
There is a point where in the mystery of
existence contradictions meet;
where movement is not all movement
and stillness is not all stillness;
where the idea and the form,
the within and the without, are united;
where infinite becomes finite,
yet not losing its infinity.

Man goes into the noisy crowd
to drown his own clamour of silence.
~
Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly.
For life is a creative idea;
it can only find itself in changing forms.
~
Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything
but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself,
to ideas which are larger than his individual life,
the idea of his country,
of humanity,
of God.

The Road Not Taken


TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?.

-- Edgar Allan Poe

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when
 I try to break them.
 Freedom is all I want, but
 to hope for it I feel ashamed.
 I am certain that priceless wealth 
is in thee, and that thou art my best
friend, but I have not the heart to 
sweep away the tinsel that fills my room

 The shroud that covers me is a shroud 
of dust and death; I hate it, yet
hug it in love.
 My debts are large, my failures great,
 my shame secret and heavy; yet when
I come to ask for my good, 
I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

 -- Rabindranath Tagore