Rabindranath Tagore — Quote from Stray Birds
“Let my love, like sunlight, surround you and yet give you illumined freedom.”
Stray Birds (1916)
Concepts: love, freedom, meaning
Resonant Quotes
- “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving Tagore's love that gives illumined freedom and Fromm's love as the answer to existence both understand love not as po...
- “Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need y...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving Tagore's metaphor of sunlight perfectly captures Fromm's vision of mature love as non-possessive giving that illumina...
- “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to ...” — Rollo May, Love and Will Tagore's sunlight metaphor and May's openness to negative emotions both conceive love as expansive consciousness that...
- “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of al...” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Both poets capture love's paradoxical demand for both connection and freedom, with Tagore's sunlight metaphor of illu...
- “The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave th...” — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving Tagore's paradoxical vision of love as simultaneously connecting ('surround you') and liberating ('illumined freedom'...
- “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against opp...” — bell hooks, Outlaw Culture Both poets envision love as inherently liberating, though hooks emphasizes love's political resistance to domination ...
- “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and ...” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition Both celebrate the paradoxical relationship between support and freedom, with Tagore's loving illumination creating s...
- “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time These quotes present contrasting yet complementary visions of love—Tagore's serene, liberating ideal directly challen...