The Quotation:
The gods are amused when the busy river condemns the idle clouds.
Who said it: Rabindranath Tagore (I think)
Source: I read it in a book of poems, but now cannot find it
Thoughts on the quote: How do we attain greatness? The western tradition, emphasizes constant
work: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop"; Benjamin Franklin wrote
that "idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and
governments" and similar thoughts are easy to find. Yet there is also a
countervailing pattern. Bertrand Russell wrote a book entitled "In
Praise of Idleness"; Virginia Woolf wrote that "it is in our idleness,
in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top".
Tagore is clearly identifying with a part of this latter group - but he
is not praising what might be called sloth, rather, he is saying that
we require idleness to be productive. He is also railing against those
who demand constant busy-ness.
A related quote
From Ovid:
You who seek an end to love, love yields to busy-ness. Be busy, and you will be safe.
About the author:
Tagore was born on May 7, 1861 in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India
and died on August 7, 1941.in the same city. He was a Bengali writer of
poems, plays, and novels, and a musician. He was the first non-European
to win the Nobel Prize in literature. He had startlingly modern views on
education, emphasizing that everyone could go to school, and lampooning
rote learning, and was a founder of the Darlington Hill School, in
England, which had minimal classroom learning. Politically, he was a
somewhat visionary nationalist, and a friend of Gandhi's.
Sources:
In general:
Wikipedia Nobel Prize
Darlington Hill School
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