Rabindranath Tagore

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 …

Ah me, why did they build my house by the road to the market town?

The tendency of the Indian mind has ever been towards that transcendentalism which does not hold religion to be ultimate but rather to be a means to a further end. This end consists in the perfect liberation of the individual in the …

There is no external means of taking freedom by the throat. It is the inward process of losing ourselves that leads to it. Bondage in all its forms has its stronghold in the inner self and not in the outside world; it is in the dimming of …

I was born in what was once the metropolis of British India. My own ancestors came floating to Calcutta upon the earliest tide of the fluctuating fortune of the East India Company. The unconventional code of life for our family has been a …

Our village poet sings: “Man will brightly flash into your sight, my heart, if you shut the door of desires.” We have seen how primitive man was occupied with his physical needs, and thus restricted himself to the present which is the time …

It is for dignity of being that we aspire through the expansion of our consciousness in a great reality of Man to which we belong. We realize it through admiration and love, through hope that soars beyond the actual, beyond our own span of …

The most important of all outstanding facts of Iranian history is the religious reform brought about by Zarathustra. There can be hardly any question that he was the first man we know who gave a definitely moral character and direction to …

The development of intelligence and physical power is equally necessary in animals and men for their purposes of living; but what is unique in man is the development of his consciousness which gradually deepens and widens the realization …

Source: *Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore* (1968) quoting Tagore

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

Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.

Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

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.

Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.

WE live in this world when we love it.

Death belongs to life as birth does. The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down.

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.

Those who have everything but thee, my God, laugh at those who have nothing but thyself.

The fountain of death makes the still water of life play.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.

Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.

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