Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore FRAS, also written Ravīndranātha Thākura, sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 May 1861
CityKolkata, India
CountryIndia
Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God's dust is greater than your idol.
We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.
The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation. They have to be endlessly explained by the commentaries of individual lives, and they gain an added mystery in each new revelation.
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.
In love, at one of its poles you find the personal, and at the other the impersonal. At one you have the positive assertion - Here I am; at the other the equally strong denial - I am not. Without this ego what is love? And again, with only this ego how can love be possible? Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. For love is most free and at the same time most bound. If God were absolutely free there would be no creation. The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one.
Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow. Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.
Our self (Soul) is maya (an illusion) where it is merely individual and finite, where it considers its separateness as absolute; it is satyam (truth) where it recognizes its essence in the universal and infinite, in the Supreme Self, in paramatman (God). This is what Christ means when he says, "Before Abraham was, I am" (i.e. before Abraham was God, who is the same that is in my soul - I am That.)
Those who draw their sustenance from science are blessed. It is for me to only derive an occasional pleasure. This is nothing worthy of conceit, but I am indeed touched by the joys. This book is an ode to such joys, a digest of my collections from various sources.
Man is a rough-hewn and woman a finished product.
I ask my destiny - what power is this That cruelly drives me onward without rest? My destiny says, "Look round!" I turn back and see It is I myself that is ever pushing me from behind.
Pessimism is a form of mental dipsomania; it disdains healthy nourishment, indulges in the strong drink of denunciation, and creates an artificial dejection which thirsts for a stronger draught.
Man's freedom is never in being saved from troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy.
Repentance is a gift of God's grace.