Where The Mind is Without Fear

This is one of my personal favourites.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

- Rabindranath Tagore

This poem is from Gitanjali, literature. Offering of Songs, published in English in1910.Biography: Tagore, Rabindranath (1861-1941), Indian poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate, was born in Calcutta, into a wealthy family. He began to write poetry as a child; his first book appeared when he was 17 years old. After a brief stay in England (1878) to study law, he returned to India, where he rapidly became the most important and popular author of the colonial era, writing poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. He composed several hundred popular songs and in 1929 also began painting. Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali, but translated many of his works into English himself. He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in literature, and in 1915 he was knighted by the British king George V. Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919 following the Amritsar massacre of 400 Indian demonstrators by British troops. Some of his more famous works are 'Balaka', 'Sonar Tari', 'Chitali', and 'Gitanjali'. His selected poems 'Sanchaita', and selected short stories 'Galpagucha' were published in India 1966. Two of his songs are national anthem of India and Bangladesh. In 1901 Rabindranath Tagore founded a school at Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, which later developed into an international institution called Visva Bharati, where he tried to revive the spirit of education of ancient India, the famed "Gurukula" system, when students spent their childhood at their teacher's house and studied there.