Welcome to our collection of quotes by Rabindranath Tagore. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (born Robindronath Thakur, 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941; sobriquet Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi) was an Indian polymath – poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".
A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's "Jana Gana Mana" and Bangladesh's "Amar Shonar Bangla". The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
Trees are Earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
The burden of the self is lightened when I laugh at myself.
The force of arms only reveals man s weakness.
You say it is only twelve o'clock. Suppose it isn't any later; can't you ever think it is afternoon when it is only twelve o'clock?
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.
Longer Version:
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.
O Fool, try to carry thyself upon thy own shoulders! O beggar, to come beg at thy own door!
The man who aims at his own aggrandisement underrates everything else.
I love you every minute of my life; you're my love and my life. Not all people are lucky to find the sense of their life. I am happy, cause I had found it when I met you -- the love of my life.
Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark.
We are hidden in ourselves, like a truth hidden in isolated facts. When we know that this One in us is One in all, then our truth is revealed.
The birds looked upon me as nothing but a man, quite a trifling creature without wings and they would have nothing to do with me. Were it not so I would build a small cabin for myself among their crowd of nests and pass my days counting the sea waves.
Love is not a mere impulse, it must contain truth, which is law.
The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.
Our atmosphere breeds fear just as it breeds malaria.
Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.
Bravery ceases to be bravery at a certain point, and becomes mere foolhardiness.
In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.
Life is indefinite -- a bundle of contradictions. We men, with our ideas, strive to give it a particular shape by melting it into a particular mould -- into the definiteness of success.
In death the many becomes one; in life the one becomes many.
You have given me Your love, filling the world with Your gifts.
The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.
There is no next after you are dead and gone from your own world.
Work, especially good work, becomes easy only when desire has learnt to discipline itself.
Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.
Someone spilled the ink on the canvas. Now boasts: I painted the night.
The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.
The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.
I will sit in the pupil of your eyes and that will carry your sight into the heart of the things.
The night kisses the fading day whispering to his ear, I am death, your mother. I am to give you fresh birth.
It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom.
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
For the current of our spiritual life creeds, rituals and channels that may thwart or help, according to their fixity or openness. When a symbol or spiritual idea becomes rigidly elaborate in its construction, it supplants the idea which it should support.
Man's freedom is never in being saved from troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy.
I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.
Today I feel that I shall win through. I have come to the gateway of the simple; I am now content to see things as they are. I have gained freedom myself; I shall allow freedom to others. In my work will be my salvation.
The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.
Set the bird's wings with gold and it will never again soar in thesky.
These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.
The winds of grace are blowing all the time, but it is you that must raise your sails.
The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, Why does it exist at all? Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be.
The trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth.
The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time,unobscured by the dust of history.
We do not want nowadays temples of worship and outward rites and ceremonies. What we really want is an Asram. We want a place where the beauty of nature and the noblest pursuits of man are in a sweet harmony.
Whenever our life is stirred by truth, it expresses energy and comes to be filled, as it were, with a creative ardor. This consciousness of the creative urge is evidence of the force of truth on our mind.
No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.
God seeks comrades and claims love,
The devil seeks slaves and claims obedience.
Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.
Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.
The echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin... Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.
Man's abiding happiness is not in getting anything but in giving himself up to what is greater than himself, to ideas which are larger than his individual life, the idea of his country, of humanity, of God.
Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.
Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.
The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.
We try to realize the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man; we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our mind.
I have read in books that we are called 'caged birds'. I cannot speak for others, but I had so much in this cage of mine that there was not room for it in the universe- at least that is what I then felt.
In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments dropped from day's caravan.
It is no easy task to lead men. But it is easy enough to drive them.
A dewdrop is a perfect integrity that has no filial memory of its parentage.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.
And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.
It means that God's Creation has not its source in any necessity; it comes from his fullness of joy; it is his love that creates, therefore in Creation is his own revealment.
Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.
Art awakens a sense of real by establishing an intimate relationship between our inner being and the universe at large, bringing us a consciousness of deep joy.
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
And because I love this life
I know I shall love death as well
The child cries out when
From the right breast the mother
Takes it away, in the very next moment
To find in the left one
It's consolation.
And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well.
Longer Version:
And because I love this life I know I shall love death as well The child cries out when From the right breast the mother Takes it away, in the very next moment to find in the left one its consolation.
It dances today, my heart,
like a peacock it dances,
it dances.
It sports a mosaic of passions like a peacock's tail,
It soars to the sky with delight, it quests,
Oh wildly, it dances today, my heart,
like a peacock it dances.
We are like newborn children, Our power is the power to grow.
I ask my destiny -- what power is this That cruelly drives me onward without rest? My destiny says, Look round! I turn back and see It is I myself that is ever pushing me from behind.
Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man.
When I think of ages past That have floated down the stream Of life and love and death, I feel how free it makes us To pass away.
Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonizes all warring element.
Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.
Great calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort: these are what make for success in life. If you can find peace in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be happier than an empress.
In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.