Rabindranath Tagore Quotes

He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gates open.

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity, but I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.

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

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

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.

I would have you come into the heart of the outer world and meet reality. Merely going on with your household duties, living your life in the world of household conventions and the drudgery of household tasks - you were not made for that! If we meet, and recognize each other, in the real world, then only will our love be true.

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.

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

God the Great Giver can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single lane.

Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.

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.

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, butfor the heart to conquer it.

Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?

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.

Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease.

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

God respects me when I work but loves me when I sing.

My husband was very eager to take me out of purdah. One day I said to him, "What do I want with the outside world?""The outside world may want you," he replied.

I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man

The time has come when I must divest Bimala of all the ideal decorations with which I decked her. It was owing to my own weakness that I indulged in such idolatry. I was too greedy. I created an angel of Bimala, in order to exaggerate my own enjoyment. But Bimala is what she is. It is preposterous to expect that she should assume the role of an angel for my pleasure. The Creator is under no obligation to supply me with angels, just because I have an avidity for imaginary perfection.

When at last we have to die it will be time enough to get cold.While we are on fire let us seethe and boil.

Children are living beings - more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.

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

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.

To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.

Men are cruel but man is kind.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

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

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

With begging and scrambling we find very little but with being true to ourselves we find a great deal more.

We cannot see Beauty till we let go our hold of it. It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander - this is untrue when stated in dry prose - oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotrie?

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

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.

YOU 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.

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.

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

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

Unending LoveI seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...In life after life, in age after age, forever.My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,In life after life, in age after age, forever.Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,It's ancient tale of being apart or together.As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.You become an image of what is remembered forever.You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.At the heart of time, love of one for another.We have played along side millions of lovers,Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,the distressful tears of farewell,Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in youThe love of all man's days both past and forever:Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -And the songs of every poet past and forever.

If only they let me, I'll go right into the dense forest where you can't find your way. And where the honey-sipping hummingbird rocks himself on the end of the thinnest branch, I will flower out as a champa.

Where the old tracks are lost new country is revealed with its wonders.

He only may chastise who loves.

We are in misery because we are creatures of self - the self that is unyielding and narrow, that reflects no light, that is blind to the infinite. Our self is loud with its own discordant clamour - it is not the tuned harp whose chords vibrate with the music of the eternal. Sighs of discontent and weariness of failure, idle regrets for the past and anxieties for the future are troubling our shallow hearts because we have not found our souls, and the self-revealing spirit has not been manifest within us. Hence our cry.

The world has kissed my Soul with its pain, asking for its return in Songs.

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

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.

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

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.

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings, - therefore he knows not himself.

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

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

A day came when all the rebel in me knew itself beaten, and then my whole nature bowed down in humble resignation in the dust. And then I saw... I saw that he was as incomparable in beauty as he was in terror. I was saved, I was rescued.

I have never been able to make out," I began, "why women are so shy about being caught reading poetry.We men--lawyers, mechanics, or what not--may well feel ashamed. If we must read poetry, it should be at dead of night, within closed doors. But you women are so akin to poesy. The Creator Himself is a lyric poet, and Jayadeva must have practised the divine art seated at His feet.

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

A fancy comes to me--that desire can never attain its object--it need never attain it.

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

We women are weak," replied Bimala. "So I suppose we must join in the conspiracy of the weak.""Women weak!" I exclaimed with a laugh. "Men belaud you as delicate and fragile, so as to delude you into thinking yourselves weak. But it is you women who are strong. Men make a great outward show of their so-called freedom, but those who know their inner minds are aware of their bondage. They havemanufactured scriptures with their own hands to bind themselves; with their very idealism they have made golden fetters of women to wind round their body and mind. If men had not that extraordinary faculty of entangling themselves in meshes of their own contriving, nothing could have kept them bound. But as foryou women, you have desired to conceive reality with body and soul. You have given birth to reality. You have suckled reality at your breasts.

Now that a full flood of music has swept over our country, let Nikhil practise his scales, while we rouse the land with our cracked voices[.]