Rabindranath Tagore Quotes

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

I have observed, on board a steamer, how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation, because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility, and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.

Love is when the soul starts to sing and the flowers of your life bloom on their own.

Religion is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite.

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.

You have made me known to friends whom I knew not. You have given me seats in homes not my own. You have brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger... When one knows You, then there is no alien, and no door is shut.

I am able to love my God because He gives me freedom to deny Him.

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

I do not love him because he is good, but because he is my child.

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.

The human soul is on its journey from the law to love, from discipline to liberation, from the moral plane to the spiritual.

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.

Power said to the world, "You are mine." The world kept it prisoner on her throne. Love said to the world, "I am thine." The world gave it the freedom of her house.

Life is perpetually creative because it contains in itself that surplus which ever overflows the boundaries of the immediate time and space, restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression in the varied forms of self-realization.

Life finds its wealth by the claims of the world, and its worth by the claims of love.

When we rejoice in our fullness, then we can part with our fruits with joy.

The weak can be terrible because they try furiously to appear strong.

The problem is not how to wipe out all differences, but how to unite with all differences intact.

Do not blame the food because you have no appetite.

Death is turning out the lamp because the dawn has appeared.

Unless you have found God in your own soul, the whole world will seem meaningless to you.

My day is done, and I am like a boat drawn on the beach, listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening.

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

The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart….. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house….. But the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house; I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

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

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience. The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky. Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.

The danger inherent in all force grows stronger when it is likely to gain success, for then it becomes temptation.

Men can only think. Women have a way of understanding without thinking. Woman was created out of God's own fancy. Man, He had to hammer into shape.

The most important lesson that man can learn from life, is not that there is pain in this world, but that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy.

Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.

Boasting is only a masked shame; it does not truly believe in itself.

Life's aspirations come in the guise of children.

Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.

The best kind of wealth is to give up inordinate desires.

The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite.

I'm lost in the middle of my birthday. I want my friends, their touch, with the earth's last love. I will take life's final offering, I will take the last human blessing.

The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition

The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.

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

Poems On Love Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.

I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free. But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.

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

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name thee my all. Let only that little be left of my will whereby I may feel thee on every side, and come to thee in everything, and offer to thee my love every moment. Let only that little be left of me whereby I may never hide thee. Let only that little of my fetters be left whereby I am bound with thy will, and thy purpose is carried out in my life--and that is the fetter of thy love.

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.

If God had so wished, he would have made all Indians speak with one language ... the unity of India has been and shall always be a unity in diversity.

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.

Inspiration follows aspiration.

Where is heaven? you ask me, my child,-the sages tell us it is beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day and night; it is not of the earth. But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust. Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet body, my child, in your palpitating heart. The sea is beating its drums in joy, the flowers are a-tiptoe to kiss you. For heaven is born in you, in the arms of the mother- dust.