Quotes by Rabindranath Tagore

The winds of grace are blowing all the time, but it is you that must raise your sails.

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

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.

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

Mans poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not.

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.

Adharmenaidhate tabat, tato bhadrani pashyati, tatah sapatnan jayati, - samulastu vinashyati. In unrightousness they prosper, in it they find their good, through it they defeat their enemies, - but they perish at the root.

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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[.]

The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga.

Spurious fame spreads from tongue to tongue like the fog of the early dawn before the sun rises.

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.

If only they let me, Ill go right into the dense forest where you cant 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.