Rabindranath Tagore Quotations | Page 5

I am restless. I am athirst for faraway things. My soul goes out in a longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance. O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute! I forget, I ever forget, that I have no wings to fly, that I am bound in this spot evermore.

The danger inherent in all force grows stronger when it is likely to gain success, for then it becomes temptation.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

O Woman, you are not merely the handiwork of God, but also of men; these are ever endowing you with beauty from their own hearts ... You are one-half woman and one-half dream.

The first flower that blossomed on this earth was an invitation to an unborn song.

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

Someone spilled the ink on the canvas. Now boasts: "I painted the night".

Oh, grant me my prayer, that I may never lose the touch of the one in the play of the many.

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.

Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt at being told that it is a fragment awaiting perfection.

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

Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin

Faith is a bird that can see the light when it is dawn and starts singing in the dark.

Please is frail like a dewdrop, while it laughs it dies. But sorrow is strong and abiding. Let sorrowful love wake in your eyes.

Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty

Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

Poems On Love Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.

The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions... Existence in itself is here to prove that it cannot be an evil.

Poems On Life: Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it. Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

Say of him what you please, but I know my child's failings. I do not love him because he is good, but because he is my little child. How should you know how dear he can be when you try to weigh his merits against his faults? When I must punish him he becomes all the more a part of my being. When I cause his tears to come my heart weeps with him. I alone have a right to blame and punish, for he only may chastise who loves.

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims

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

Man discovers his own wealth when God comes to ask gifts of him.

Asks the Possible of the Impossible, "Where is your dwelling-place?" "In the dreams of the Impotent," comes the answer.

God is neither manifest nor hidden; He is neither revealed nor unrevealed; there are no words to tell that which He is. He is without form, without quality, without decay.

Whatever character our theology may ascribe to him, in reality God is the infinite ideal of Man, towards whom men move in their collective growth, with whom they seek their union of love as individuals, in whom they find their ideal of father, friend and beloved.

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action-Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

God finds himself by creating.

I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.

It means that God's Creation has not its source in any necessity; it comes from his fullness of joy; it is his love that creates, therefore in Creation is his own revealment.

To the birds you gave songs, the birds gave you songs in return. You gave me only a voice, yet asked for more, thus I sing.

A dewdrop is a perfect integrity that has no filial memory of its parentage.

I touch God in my songas the hill touched the far-away seawith its waterfall.

Everything has sprung from immortal life and is vibrating with life, for life is immense!

The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.

The trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth

Give Me Strength This is my prayer to thee, my lord---strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart. Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows. Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service. Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might. Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles. And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love.

Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.

Only Thee That I want thee, only thee---let my heart repeat without end. All desires that distract me, day and night, are false and empty to the core. As the night keeps hidden in its gloom the petition for light, even thus in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry ---`I want thee, only thee'. As the storm still seeks its end in peace when it strikes against peace with all its might, even thus my rebellion strikes against thy love and still its cry is ---`I want thee, only thee'.

I will sit in the pupil of your eyes and that will carry your sight into the heart of the things

On each race is laid the duty to keep alight its own lamp of mind as its part in the illumination of the world. To break the lamp of any people into deprive it of its rightful place in the world festival.

There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

Love's over brimming mystery joins death and life. It has filled my cup of pain with joy.

Music is the purest form of art... therefore true poets...seek to express the universe in terms of music. The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside.

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.

One who has never known the turbulence of life, in whom the petals of the mysterious flower within have never opened; such a one may seem happy, may seem a saint, his single track mind may impress the multitude with its power - but he is ill equipped for life's true adventure into the infinite.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'

that which is eternal within the moment only becomes shallow if spread out in time.

This principle of opposites is at the very root of Creation, which is divided between the rule of the King and the Queen; Night and Day; the One and the Varied; the Eternal and the Evolving.

The smile that flickers on a baby’s lips when he sleeps- does anyone know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.

My Friend: Art thou abroad on this stormy night on thy journey of love, my friend? The sky groans like one in despair. I have no sleep tonight. Ever and again I open my door and look out on the darkness, my friend! I can see nothing before me. I wonder where lies thy path! By what dim shore of the ink-black river, by what far edge of the frowning forest, through what mazy depth of gloom art thou threading thy course to come to me, my friend?

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,' said the dewdrop to the lake.

Ah, thou hast made my heart captive in the endless meshes of thy music, my master!

I am willing to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.

for we women are not only the deities of the household fire, but the flame of the soul itself.

Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man.

Come oh come ye tea-thirsty restless ones -- the kettle boils, bubbles and sings, musically.

Today I feel that I shall win through. I have come to the gateway of the simple; I am now content to see things as they are. I have gained freedom myself; I shall allow freedom to others. In my work will be my salvation.

The greed for fruit misses the flower.

The echo mocks her origin to prove she is the original.

My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. They are the cradle of the morning, they are the kingdom of the stars. My songs are lost in their depths. Let me but soar in that sky, in its lonely immensity. Let me but cleave its clouds and spread wings in its sunshine.

Let it not be death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night. Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence. I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us.

The birth and death of leaves is part of that greater cycle that moves among the stars.

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.

Let the splendor of diamond, pearl and ruby vanish? Only let this one teardrop, this Taj Mahal, glisten spotlessly bright on the cheek of time, forever and ever.

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.

I never give answers. I lead on from one question to another. That is my leadership.

The thing which seems so glorious when viewed from the heights of the country's cause looks so muddy when seen from the bottom. One begins by getting angry and then feels disgusted.

Leave out my name from the gift if it be a burden, but keep my song.

I sit at my window gazing The world passes by, nods to me And is gone.

Children who are decked with prince's robes and who have jeweled chains round their necks lose all pleasure in play; their dress hampers them at every step. In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust, they keep themselves from the world and are afraid ever to move. Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of entrance to the great fair of common human life.

Do not blame the food because you have no appetite.

In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments dropped from day's caravan.

When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonizes all warring element

It is no easy task to lead men. But it is easy enough to drive them.

Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.

Our creation is the modification of relationship.

Our responsibility is no longer to acquire, but to BE.

False hope is clung to with all one's might and main, till a day comes when it has sucked the heart dry and it forcibly breaks through its bonds and departs. After that comes the misery of awakening, and then once again the longing to get back into the maze of the same mistakes.

Work, especially good work, becomes easy only when desire has learned to discipline itself.

The force of arms only reveals man s weakness.

The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

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

Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us.

To be constantly changing one's plans isn't decision at all-it's indecision.

He alone may chastise who loves.

Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.

By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love which is greater than theirs, and thout keepst me free. Lest I forgot them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou art not seen. If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

Who are you, a hundred years from today, reading my poetry with curiosity?

Saltwater heals, healing referring to its various forms; tears, cleanses and heals the soul; sweat, cleanses through labor; the ocean, heals in all its forms.

Joy is there everywhere; it is superfluous, unnecessary; nay, it very often contradicts the most peremptory behests of necessity. It exists to show that the bonds of law can only be explained by love; they are like body and soul. Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover.

I have observed, on board a steamer, how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation, because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility, and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.

If God had so wished, he could have made all Indians speak one language... the unity of India has been and shall always be a unity in diversity.

O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate.We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe in the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart's blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again

The hours trip rapidly away, hiding their dreams in their skirts.