"न रत्नमन्विष्यति मृग्यते हि तत्"
"O my good fortune, please subdue the anguish of your Soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn."
"We have watered the trees that blossom in the summer-time. Now let's sprinkle those whose flowering-time is past. That will be a better deed, because we shall not be working for a reward."
"A thought is as vivid as an act, to a lover."
"Grief must be shared to be endured."
"What is intended to be said, if left unsaid, becomes a matter of regret later."
"A bee may be born in a hole in a tree, but she likes the honey of the lotus."
"It is just such women, selfish, sweet, false, that entice fools."
"I cannot taste the sweet, and cannot leave it."
"To be a king, is to be a disappointed man."
"A good man never lets grief get the upper hand. The mountains are calm even in a tempest."
"John Brough, Poems from the Sanskrit (London: Penguin, 1968) no. 165"
"Chandra Rajan, Kalidasa: The Loom of Time (Calcutta: Penguin Books, 1989)"
"W. J. Johnson, The Recognition of Sakuntala; Sakuntala in the Mahabharata (New York: Oxford UP, 2001)"
"Kalidasa, the immortal poet and playwright, is a peerless genius whose works have won world-wide fame. The matchless qualities of his work have been lavishly praised both by the ancient Indian critics and modern scholars. ... In modern times the translations of Kalidasa's works in numerous Indian and foreign languages have spread his fame all over the world and now he ranks among the few topmost poets and playwrights of the world."
"The first time I came upon this inexhaustible work, it aroused such enthusiasm in me and so held me that I could not stop studying it. I even felt impelled to make the impossible attempt to bring it in some form to the German stage. These efforts were fruitless but they made me so thoroughly acquainted with this most valuable work, it represented such an epoch in my life, I so absorbed it, that for thirty years I did not look at either the English or the German version. It is only now that I understand the enormous impression that work made on me at an earlier age."
"In the whole world of Greek antiquity there is no poetical representation of beautiful love which approaches even afar."
"I cannot easily find a product of human mind more pleasant than this [Shakuntala] ... a real blossom of the Orient, and the first, most beautiful of its kind! Something like that, of course, appears once every two thousand years."
"I advance an opinion that we have few specimens either in classical or modern poetry of more genuine tenderness or delicate feeling."