228 Inspiring Quotes by Rabindranath Tagore

It is the tears of the earth that keep her smiles in bloom.

Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.

There is no "next" after you are dead and gone from your own world.

Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

You smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.

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.

O Fool, try to carry thyself upon thy own shoulders! O beggar, to come beg at thy own door!

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.

When you came you cried and everybody smiled with joy; when you go smile and let the world cry for you.

And, indeed, what little of beauty and peace is to be found in the societies of men is owing to the daily performance of small duties, not to big doings and fine talk.

In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments dropped from day's caravan.

On death the many become one, in life the one becomes many.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

Clothed in facts truth feels oppressed. In the garb of poetry it moves easy and free.

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.

He who wants to do good knocks at the gate: he who loves finds the door open.

We are like newborn children, Our power is the power to grow.

And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well.

Sen beni her zaman reddedip, zayıf, şüpheli arzuların tehlikesinden kurtararak günden güne senin tarafından kabul edilmeye layık bir hale getiriyorsun.

The force of arms only reveals man s weakness.

The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.

In death the many becomes one; in life the one becomes many.

A dewdrop is a perfect integrity that has no filial memory of its parentage.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free.

The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.

Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.

Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.

Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.

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.

The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga.

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.

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?

Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.

Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.

I touch God in my songas the hill touched the far-away seawith its waterfall.

Please is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs it dies. But sorrow is strong and abiding. Let sorrowful love wake in your eyes.

The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

Come oh come ye tea-thirsty restless ones -- the kettle boils, bubbles and sings, musically.

Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.

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.

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.

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.

Someone spilled the ink on the canvas. Now boasts: "I painted the night."

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

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.

And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it is thy power gives me strength to act.

The echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.

The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.

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.

God seeks comrades and claims love,
The devil seeks slaves and claims obedience.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty.

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.

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

All that is not given is lost.

The man who aims at his own aggrandisement underrates everything else.

The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.

Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.

If you allow your mind to carp at all and sundry, it will turn against itself: the majority of our sorrows are self-inflicted.

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.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Merely to exist is not enough.

Saltwater heals, healing referring to its various forms; tears, cleanses and heals the soul; sweat, cleanses through labor; the ocean, heals in all its forms.

When you have once taken up a responsibility, you must see it through.

Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!

No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.

Compliments win friends, honesty loses them.

Life's aspirations come in the guise of children.

O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

Do not say, 'It is morning,' and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.

These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.

Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.

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.

Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.

The trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth.

The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.

The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave. The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

You have given me Your love, filling the world with Your gifts.

If you want to know India, study Vivekananda. In him everything is positive and nothing negative.

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.

Set the bird's wings with gold and it will never again soar in thesky.

From the grasses in the field to the stars in the sky, each one is doing just that; and there is such profound peace and surpassing beauty in nature because none of these tries forcibly to transgress its limitations.

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

It is no easy task to lead men. But it is easy enough to drive them.

Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.

We gain freedom when we have paid the full price.

Love is not a mere impulse, it must contain truth, which is law.

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.

I am willing to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.

The greed for fruit misses the flower.

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 greatest distance in this World is not that between living and death, it is when I am just before you, and you don't know that I Love You.

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.

I will sit in the pupil of your eyes and that will carry your sight into the heart of the things.

It is the docile who achieve the most impossible things in this world.

Everything has sprung from immortal life and is vibrating with life, for life is immense!

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.

By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

Let my love like sunlight surround you and yet give you illumined freedom.

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

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.

Our atmosphere breeds fear just as it breeds malaria.

What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.

Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.

Bravery ceases to be bravery at a certain point, and becomes mere foolhardiness.

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.

The winds of grace are blowing all the time, but it is you that must raise your sails.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance.

The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.

For many years, at great cost, I traveled through many countries, saw the high mountains, the oceans. The only things I did not see were the sparkling dewdrops in the grass just outside my door.

Free me as free is the forest fire, as is the thunder that laughs aloud and hurls defiance to darkness.

If religion, instead of being the manifestation of a spiritual ideal, gives prominence to scriptures and external rites, then does it disturb the peace more than anything else.

The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.

The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.

Work, especially good work, becomes easy only when desire has learnt to discipline itself.

When I stand before thee at the day's end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.

Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.

He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.

By touching you may kill, by keeping away you may possess.

The real frienship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darken.

Discipline divorced from wisdom is not true discipline, but merely the meaningless following of custom, which is only a disguise for stupidity.

Music fills the infinite between two souls.

The burden of the self is lightened when I laugh at myself.

It was always the poor grass that suffered most when two kings went to war.

I leave no trace of wings in the air, but I am glad I have had my flight.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.

The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time,unobscured by the dust of history.

Plunge into the deep without fear, with the gladness of April in your heart.

O Woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their own hearts ... You are one-half woman and one-half dream.

The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

Let the splendor of diamond, pearl and ruby vanish? Only let this one teardrop, this Taj Mahal, glisten spotlessly bright on the cheek of time, forever and ever.

Yo are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side," said the dewdrop to the lake.

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.

We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do.

Do not linger to gather flowers to keep them, but walk on, for flowers will keep themselves blooming all your way.

Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

Let not the hours pass by in the dark. Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.

The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.

The night kisses the fading day whispering to his ear, "I am death, your mother. I am to give you fresh birth.

From the solemn gloom of the temple children run out to sit in the dust, God watches them play and forgets the priest.

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

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.

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.

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day.

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.