Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.

Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit-Gathering, 1916

Literature

The story behind the card

These words open poem 79 of Fruit-Gathering (1916), a collection of short poems that Tagore translated into English himself after the English Gitanjali (1912) and the 1913 Nobel Prize had made him famous in the West. The poem keeps the same pattern: he asks not for his pain to be stilled but for a heart to conquer it, not for allies but for his own strength, and to feel God's hand in failure as well as in success. Tagore knew loss at first hand: between 1902 and 1907 he lost his wife, a daughter, his father and his younger son.

Türkçe oku
Tehlikelerden korunmak için değil, onlara korkusuzca göğüs gerebilmek için dua edeyim.
Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit-Gathering, 1916

Bu dizeler, Tagore'un Fruit-Gathering (Meyve Toplama, 1916) kitabındaki 79. şiirin başıdır. İngilizce Gitanjali (1912) ve 1913'teki Nobel ödülüyle Batı'da ün kazanan Tagore, bu kısa şiirleri de kendisi İngilizceye çevirmişti. Şiir aynı kalıpla sürer: Acısının dinmesini değil, onu yenecek bir yürek ister; yardımcı aramaz, kendi gücüne dayanmak ister; Tanrı'nın elini yalnız başarıda değil, yenilgide de hissetmeyi diler. Tagore kaybı yaşayarak tanımıştı: 1902 ile 1907 arasında eşini, bir kızını, babasını ve küçük oğlunu yitirdi.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Rabindranath Tagore
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

I've fallen in love, or imagine that I have. I went to a party and lost my head. I bought a horse, which I don't need at all.

Leo Tolstoy wrote this in his diary in Moscow on 25 January 1851, when he was 22 and still years away from War and Peace. Eight days earlier, on 17 January, he had set out his money troubles in the same diary: overdue promissory notes, no cash, plans to sell a horse and even to pawn his watch. In the 25 January entry, after the unnecessary purchase, he set himself two rules: do not offer a price for a thing you do not need, and on arriving at a ball, ask someone to dance at once. Tolstoy began keeping a diary at 18 and kept it, with gaps, until his death in 1910, using it to watch himself and to set rules he often broke. Before his wedding in 1862 he gave his diaries to his fiancée, Sophia Behrs, to read.

Leo Tolstoy, from his diariesRead card
StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.

Rumi (popular attribution)Read card
StillnessLiterature

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it.

The line is shared widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, novel or letter containing it has been found. Born in Germany in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, he spent more than a decade as a filing clerk at the city's post office. In 1969 his publisher, John Martin, offered him financial support to write full time. Bukowski wrote that he could stay and go crazy, or leave and starve: “I have decided to starve.” Within a month he had finished his first novel, Post Office.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card
Next card in the archiveOut of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars.Read next →