Rabindranath Tagore Quotes

By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love which is greater than theirs, and thout keepst me free. Lest I forgot them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou art not seen. If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my house. I find her not. My house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained. But infinite is thy mansion, my lord, and seeking her I have come to thy door.

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.

Whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations.

It is in the very heart of our activity that we search for our goal.

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

The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize.

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

The pious sectarian is proud because he is confident of his right of possession in God. The man of devotion is meek because he is conscious of God's right of love over his life and soul.

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

On each race is laid the duty to keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamp of any people into deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

He alone may chastise who loves.

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.

Leave out my name from the gift if it be a burden, but keep my song.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it. Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on. Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and visible.

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.

If life's journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own.

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.

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

Great suffering brings with it the power of great endurance. When sorrow is deepest all the forces of patience and courage are banded together to do their duty. So while we are cowards before petty troubles, great sorrows make us brave by rousing our truer manhood.

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

to tyrannize for the country is to tyrannize over the country

Music fills the infinite between two souls.

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

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

The meaning of this is, that whomsoever we love, in him we find our own soul in the highest sense. The final truth of our existence lies in this. God, the Supreme Soul, is in me, as well as in my son, and my joy in my son is the realisation of this truth.

Life itself is a strange mixture. We have to take it as it is, try to understand it, and then to better it.

Brahma was excessively sparing with earth, water, and fire.... The reckless expenditure of air and ether in his composition was amazing. And, in consequence, he perpetually struggled to outreach the wind, to outrun space itself. Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the Horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin.

Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin

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

The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons

The small wisdom is like water in a glass: clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like the water in the sea: dark, mysterious, impenetrable.

Let me not look for allies in life's battlefield,But to my own strength. Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,But for the patience to win my freedom.

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

Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.

The Great Morning which is for all, rises in the East.

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

The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.

Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits.

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.

The flower fades and dies; but he who wears the flower has not to mourn for it for ever.

I never give answers. I lead on from one question to another. That is my leadership.

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