Rabindranath Tagore on Religion

"My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted."

"God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land."

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

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

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

"God finds himself by creating."

"Reason tells us that creation never can be perfectly happy. So long as it is incomplete it must put up with imperfection and sorrow. It can only be perfect when it ceases to be creation, and is God. Do our prayers dare go so far?"

"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."

"The human soul is on its journey from the law to love, from discipline to liberation, from the moral plane to the spiritual. Buddha preached the discipline of self-restraint and moral life; it is a complete acceptance of law. But this bondage of law cannot be an end by itself; by mastering it thoroughly we acquire the means of getting beyond it. It is going back to Brahma, to the infinite love, which is manifesting itself through the finite forms of law."