"The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous"
About this Quote
A single flower has no need to covet the thorns’ abundance; Tagore flips our usual scorecard for success with one clean image. “Numerous” is the bait. It’s the language of crowds, metrics, and the kind of social power that looks impressive from a distance. Tagore answers with “single,” a word that can sound like weakness until he turns it into a kind of sovereignty: the flower’s value isn’t multiplied by quantity, and it isn’t improved by borrowing the thorn’s defensive theater.
The subtext is a critique of comparison culture before the term existed. Thorns are “numerous” because they’re designed for repetition: protection by proliferation, survival by sharpness. The flower doesn’t compete on that axis. It wins by being what it is - brief, exposed, purposeless in the practical sense, and therefore radiant. Tagore isn’t romanticizing fragility so much as insisting that different forms of worth shouldn’t be forced into the same accounting system.
Context matters: Tagore wrote from a Bengal in the churn of colonial modernity, where Western industrial logic and bureaucratic measures of progress were crowding out older aesthetic and spiritual valuations. Against that backdrop, the line reads like quiet resistance. Don’t envy the apparatus of power just because it’s everywhere. Don’t mistake hardness for importance. The flower’s “single” presence is enough - a rebuke to the idea that significance must be armored, replicated, or backed by a crowd.
The subtext is a critique of comparison culture before the term existed. Thorns are “numerous” because they’re designed for repetition: protection by proliferation, survival by sharpness. The flower doesn’t compete on that axis. It wins by being what it is - brief, exposed, purposeless in the practical sense, and therefore radiant. Tagore isn’t romanticizing fragility so much as insisting that different forms of worth shouldn’t be forced into the same accounting system.
Context matters: Tagore wrote from a Bengal in the churn of colonial modernity, where Western industrial logic and bureaucratic measures of progress were crowding out older aesthetic and spiritual valuations. Against that backdrop, the line reads like quiet resistance. Don’t envy the apparatus of power just because it’s everywhere. Don’t mistake hardness for importance. The flower’s “single” presence is enough - a rebuke to the idea that significance must be armored, replicated, or backed by a crowd.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Rabindranath Tagore — appears as a short poem/fragment in Stray Birds (collection of short aphoristic poems). |
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