Rabindranath Tagore Quotes

267 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Rabindranath Tagore
You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

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

Rabindranath Tagore
Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.

Rabindranath Tagore
No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.

Rabindranath Tagore
In India, the measure of a singer's freedom is in his own creative personality. He can sing the composer's song as his own, if he has the power creatively to assert himself in his interpretation of the general law of the melody which he is given to interpret.

Rabindranath Tagore
The water vessel, taken as a vessel only, raises the question, "Why does it exist at all?" Through its fitness of construction, it offers the apology for its existence. But where it is a work of beauty it has no question to answer; it has nothing to do, but to be.

Rabindranath Tagore
In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.

Rabindranath Tagore
If you sit down crying because the sun has set, you miss the privilege of seeing the stars. Sorrow for what you have lost should not make you neglect that which comes in its place.

Rabindranath Tagore
The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realization of yoga, of union; not on the side of the canvas where it is blank, but on the side where the picture is being painted.

Rabindranath Tagore
God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land.

Rabindranath Tagore
My heart today smiles at its past night of tears
like a wet tree glistening in the sun
after the rain is over.

Rabindranath Tagore
It is the docile who achieve the most impossible things in this world.

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

Rabindranath Tagore
O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

Rabindranath Tagore
Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unendi.

Rabindranath Tagore
I believe in a spiritual world - not as anything separate from this world - but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth, that we are living in God.

Rabindranath Tagore
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.

Rabindranath Tagore
The spirit of rejection finds its support in the consciousness of separateness; the spirit of acceptance finds its base in the consciousness of unity.

Rabindranath Tagore
And joy is everywhere; it is in the earth's green covering of grass; in the blue serenity of the sky.

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

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

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

Rabindranath Tagore
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.

Rabindranath Tagore