I sipped the sap of each sane pleasure;
I exulted in the crushed beauty of sextillion stars;
I made a bonfire of all sorrows and basked in the glory blaze;
I quaffed the questing love of all hearts;
I mingled paternal, maternal, and fraternal love together,
And drank the solacing draught;
I squeezed the scriptures for drops of peace;
I wrung poems from the winepress of Nature;
I lifted gems from the mine of thoughts;
I stole the sweetness from the honeycomb of innocent joys;
I read, I smiled, I worked, I planned, I throbbed, I aspired;
But naught was sufficient.
Only nightmares of incompleteness,
Ever receding will-o’-the wisps of promised happiness,
Haunted and hastened my heart.
But when I cast all dreams away,
I found the deep sanctuary of peace,
And my soul sang: “God alone! God alone!”

- Paramahanasa Yogananda

They did their best
And they are blest-
The sap, the shoots,
The little leaves and roots;
The benign breath,
The touch of light –
All worked in amity
To grow the rose’s beauty.
Watch its splendour,
Its undying grandeur,
The Infinite Face
That peeps through its little case.
Watch not in grief
Its falling petals or its brief
Sojourn here;
For its career
Done, its duty ends;
Toward the Immortal’s home it tends.
The sap dried,
The summer petals fled,
Its body pines;
Yet its death’s divine;
Through the death it spurns
Its deathless glory’s won;
The rose is dead –
Its beauty lives instead.

- P.Yogananda