Rabindranath Tagore FRAS, also known by his pen name Bhanu Singha Thakur, and also known by his sobriquets Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. Profoundly inspirational Rabindranath Tagore quotes will get you through anything when the going gets tough and help you succeed in every aspect of life.
If you’re searching for inspiring poetry quotes from poets that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of quotes by TS Eliot, best Walt Whitman quotes and greatest Sylvia Plath quotes.
Famous Rabindranath Tagore Quotes
Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.
It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances. It sports a mosaic of passions like a peacock’s tail, It soars to the sky with delight, it quests, Oh wildly, it dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances.
We cross infinity with every step; we meet eternity in every second.
Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.
I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.
It is no easy task to lead men. But it is easy enough to drive them.
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.
The heart wants to go on; that is its dharma. For unless it moves, it dies.
I do not love him because he is good, but because he is my child.
The pious sectarian is proud because he is confident of his right of possession in God. The man of devotion is meek because he is conscious of God’s right of love over his life and soul.
When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.
Unless you have found God in your own soul, the whole world will seem meaningless to you.
It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.
Love is not a mere impulse, it must contain truth, which is law.
The newer people of this modern age are more eager to amass than to realize.
I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free. But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.
We are hidden in ourselves, like a truth hidden in isolated facts. When we know that this One in us is One in all, then our truth is revealed.
If life’s journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own.
Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.
Our scientific world is our world of reasoning. It has its greatness and uses and attractions. We are ready to pay homage due to it. But when it claims to have discovered the real world for us and laughs at the worlds of all simple-minded men, then we must say it is like a general grown intoxicated with his power, usurping the throne of his king
Inspirational Rabindranath Tagore Quotes
Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.
The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment’s hesitation to crush beauty and life.
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.
Music fills the infinite between two souls.
Life’s fulfillment finds constant obstacles in its path; but those are necessary for the sake of its advance. The stream is saved from the sluggishness of its current by the perpetual opposition of the soil through which it must cut its way. The spirit of fight belongs to the genius of life.
The best kind of wealth is to give up inordinate desires.
The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Dark clouds become heaven’s flowers when kissed by light.
Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and visible.
Where is heaven? you ask me, my child,-the sages tell us it is beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day and night; it is not of the earth. But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust. Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet body, my child, in your palpitating heart. The sea is beating its drums in joy, the flowers are a-tiptoe to kiss you. For heaven is born in you, in the arms of the mother- dust.
Beauty, find thyself in love, not in the flattery of thy mirror.
There is a moral law in this world which has its application both to individuals and organized bodies of men. You cannot go on violating these laws in the name of your nation, yet enjoy their advantage as individuals. We may forget truth for our conv
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
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.
Only those of tranquil minds, and none else, can attain abiding joy, by realizing within their souls the Being who manifests one essence in a multiplicity of forms.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
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.
A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them.
When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy. When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song. When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest. When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king. When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.
Facts are many, but the truth is one.
Top Rabindranath Tagore Quotes
Love is when the soul starts to sing and the flowers of your life bloom on their own.
A lamp can only light another lamp when it continues to burn in its own flame.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.
The main object of teaching is not to give explanations, but to knock at the doors of the mind.
Men are cruel, but Man is kind.
If religion, instead of being the manifestation of a spiritual ideal, gives prominence to scriptures and external rites, then does it disturb the peace more than anything else.
Inspiration follows aspiration.
Men can only think. Women have a way of understanding without thinking. Woman was created out of God’s own fancy. Man, He had to hammer into shape.
It sometimes strikes me how immensely fortunate I am that each day should take its place in my life, either reddened with the rising and setting sun, or refreshingly cool with deep, dark clouds, or blooming like a white flower in the moonlight. What untold wealth!
These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination.
Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Let us unite, not in spite of our differences, but through them. For differences can never be wiped away, and life would be so much the poorer without them. Let all human races keep their own personalities, and yet come together, not in a uniformity that is dead, but in a unity that is living.
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
The real frienship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darken.
In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.
The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.
By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
Go not to the temple to put flowers upon the feet of God, first fill your own house with the fragrance of love. Go not to the temple to light candles before the altar of God, first remove the darkness of sin from your heart. Go not to the temple to bow down your head in prayer, first learn to bow in humility before your fellow men. Go not to the temple to pray on bended knees, first bend down to lift someone who is down trodden. Go not to the temple to ask for forgiveness for your sins, first forgive from your heart those who have sinned against you.
We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality.
Set the bird’s wings with gold and it will never again soar in thesky.
Art awakens a sense of real by establishing an intimate relationship between our inner being and the universe at large, bringing us a consciousness of deep joy.
I leave no trace of wings in the air, but I am glad I have had my flight.
The birds looked upon me as nothing but a man, quite a trifling creature without wings-and they would have nothing to do with me. Were it not so I would build a small cabin for myself among their crowd of nests and pass my days counting the sea waves.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.
Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave. The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.
To tyrannize for the country is to tyrannize over the country
