Rabindranath Tagore Quotes

1861–1941 India

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), also known as Rabi Thakur, was a Bengali philosopher, poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

India
Composers
Essayists
Musicians
Nobel laureates

Also known as: R. Tagore, Rabindranath Thakur, Tagore, Tagore, Rabindranath

Random Rabindranath Tagore quote

112 quotes

Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.

Stray Birds (1916)

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.

Gitanjali (1912)

In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time.

Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.

Stray Birds (1916)

The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time,
unobscured by the dust of history.

Fireflies (1928)

Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

Stray Birds (1916)

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Stray Birds (1916)

Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

Stray Birds (1916)

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

Stray Birds (1916)

Thus great suffering brings with it the power of great endurance.

Glimpses of Bengal (1921)

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.

Stray Birds (1916)

Of course man is useful to man, because his body is a marvellous machine and his mind an organ of wonderful efficiency. But he is a spirit as well, and this spirit is truly known only by love.

Jewel-Like the immortal
does not boast of its length of years
but of the scintillating point of the moment.

Fireflies (1928)

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

Stray Birds (1916)

Light finds her treasure of colours
through the antagonism of clouds.

Fireflies (1928)

The one without second is emptiness,
the other one makes it true.

Fireflies (1928)

Ah me, why did they build my house by the road to the market town?

The Gardener (1915)

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Stray Birds (1916)

Civilisation can never sustain itself upon cannibalism of any form. For that by which alone man is true can only be nourished by love and justice.

All the great utterances of man have to be judged not by the letter but by the spirit — the spirit which unfolds itself with the growth of life in history.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Rabindranath Tagore (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.