Quotes from Rabindranath Tagore

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

LOVE! when you come with the burning lamp of pain in your hand, I can see your face and know you as bliss.

Nations which have got on in the world have done so by action, not by ebullition.

For the elements which have lost their living bond of reality have lost the meaning of their existence.

To thee, to thee, O my beauty, 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.

My songs are like bees; they follow through the air some fragrant trace — some memory — of you, to hum around your shyness, eager for its hidden store. When the freshness of dawn droops in the sun, when in the noon the air hangs low with heaviness and the forest is silent, my songs return home, their languid wings dusted with gold.

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 thought I would write love's words in their own colour; but that lies deep in the heart, and tears are pale. Would you know them, friend, if the words were colourless? I thought I would sing love's words to their own tune, but that sounds only in my heart, and my eyes are silent. Would you know them, friend, if there were no tune?

When this organization of politics and commerce, whose other name is the Nation, becomes all-powerful at the cost of the harmony of the higher social life, then it is an evil day for humanity

Sit still my heart, do not raise your dust. Let the world find its way to you.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. 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.

20 Día tras día él llega y se va. Ve y dale esta flor de mi pelo, amigo. Si te pregunta quién se la envía, no se lo digas, te lo ruego, pues si viene, es para volverse a ir. Está sentado bajo un árbol, en el suelo. Prepárale un lecho de pétalos y hojas, amigo. Sus ojos están tristes y su mirada pesa en mi corazón. Nunca dice qué piensa, sólo viene y se va.

WOMAN, when you move about in your household service your limbs sing like a hill stream among its pebbles.

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

the personal man is eliminated to a phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy

Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation.

he has his responsibilities to the higher faculties of his nature, by ignoring which he may achieve success

The dust of the dead words clings to thee. Wash thy soul with silence.

to justify their own spilling of ink they spell the day as night

The question and the cry, "Oh, where?" melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance, "I am!

At the ebb of day comes the tide of night Carrying myriads of star-flowers Floating on its dark waters. - Poem 1

In its swelling pride The bubble doubts the truth of the sea And laughs and bursts into emptiness

Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.

I WOULD ask for still more, if I had the sky with all its stars, and the world with its endless riches; but I would be content with the smallest corner of this earth if only she were mine