Quotes from Rabindranath Tagore

Read books when you are free, read minds when you are'nt....but do read...

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

What seems to be coming at you is really coming from you

to tyrannize for the country is to tyrannize over the country

The Taj Mahal rises above the banks of the river like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time.

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

If someone smells a flower and says he does not understand, the reply to him is: there is nothing to understand, it is only a scent. If he persists, saying: that I know, but what does it all mean? Then one has either to change the subject, or make it more abstruse by saying that the scent is the shape which the universal joy takes in the flower.

And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. (#95)

Dreams can never be made captive.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

The world loved man when he smiled. The world became afraid of him when he laughed.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Poems On Life: Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it. Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

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.

seorang guru tidak akan pernah bisa benar-benar mengajar kecuali dia sendiri masih belajar; sebuah lampu tidak akan menyalakan lampu lain kecuali ia terus menyala dengan apinya sendiri

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 but for the heart to conquer it. 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 hope for the patience to win my freedom. Grant 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.

Yes, this is the logic of the Nation. And it will never heed the voice of truth and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine unto machine; trampling under its tread all the sweet flowers of simple faith and the living ideals of man.

If no one responds to your call, then go your own way alone.

From my heart comes out and dances the image of my own desire. The gleaming vision flits on. I try to clasp it firmly, it eludes me and leads me astray. I seek what I cannot get, I get what I do not seek.

Neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history.

Love does not claim possession but gives freedom.

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.

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.

I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark? I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not. He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter. He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company.