Rabindranath Tagore Quotes

Greatest writer in modern Indian literature, Bengali poet, novelist, educator, and an early advocate of Independence for India. Tagaore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.   These are some of his famous quotes….

Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”

“Love’s gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.”

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

Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the universal being; truth the perfect comprehension of the universal mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness – how, otherwise, can we know truth?

Children are living beings – more living than grown-up people who have built shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love.

Do not say, “It is morning,” and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name

In our desire for eternal life we pray for an eternity of our habit and comfort, forgetting that immortality is in repeatedly transcending the definite forms of life in order to pursue the infinite truth of life.

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.

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

Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.

Objects of knowledge maintain an infinite distance from us who are the knowers. For knowledge is not union. Therefore the further world of freedom awaits us there where we reach truth, not through feeling it by senses or knowing it by reason, but through union of perfect sympathy.

There are men whose idea of life is tactic, who long for its continuation after death only because of their wish for permanence and not perfection; they love to imagine that the things to which they are accustomed will persist for ever. They completely identify themselves in their minds with their fixed surroundings and with whatever they have gathered, and to have to leave these is death for them. They forget that the true meaning of living is outliving, it is ever growing out of itself.

We do not want nowadays temples of worship and outward rites and ceremonies. What we really want is an Asram. We want a place where the beauty of nature and the noblest pursuits of man are in a sweet harmony. Our temple of worship is there where outward nature and human soul meet in union.