“It’s never too late to be who you were meant to be.”

Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Souls live on in perpetual echoes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

I will be rich or I will die trying.

Just ’cause something’s popular, it can still be good. In fact, if more people are buying it, then you must be doing something right.

Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

It will soon be 25 years from the date of publication of my first research work. That the scientific aspirations kindled by that early work did not suffer extinction has been due entirely to the opportunities provided for me by the great city of Calcutta.

We may be weak, but looking at our weakness will never make us strong.

It will not be an activity in which all people can participate.