Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, composer, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and painter who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He is the pre-eminent literary genius not only of his native Bengal but also of South Asia—possibly the whole of Asia.
Tagore displayed an extraordinary combination of talents. He experimented with various forms of art and sought an outlet first in music, then in drama, opera, and ballet and, toward the end of his life, in painting. Tagore was a talented theatrical artist, a playwright, and a producer of plays. He also inspired and directed the revival and full development of the art of dance in modern India. Tagore is extraordinary for his versatility, exceptional range, and complexity of a creative perspective.
Born in Calcutta, Tagore went to study law in England at age 17 but found the weather depressing. He returned to Calcutta after a year and concurrently wrote, composed music, painted, and did political work. He gained worldwide attention with the English translation of the spiritual verse Gītāñjali (1910; Song Offering,) which featured an appreciatory foreword by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
Tagore’s first book was a volume of poetry, Kabi-Kahini (1878; The Tale of the Poet,) followed by novels, short stories, and dramatic works. In addition to Gītāñjali, his major works include Binodini (1902; Eng trans 1964, the first modern novel by an Indian writer,) the collection of poems about childhood The Crescent Moon (1913,) and his best-known play, Chitra (1914.) He also wrote Jivan Smriti (1911; My Reminiscences, 1917) and Chhelebela (1940; My Boyhood Days.)
As a philosopher, Tagore challenged the binarism of India’s spiritual values and the spirit of the West. He held that one’s native culture could be reconciled by acknowledging and absorbing the good in other cultures. Taking into consideration the great conflicts of his time, Tagore articulated his vision of the “universal man.” He wrote, “The unity of human civilization can be better maintained by linking up in fellowship and cooperation of the different civilizations of the world.” And, “Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed.”
Tagore’s versatile genius wielded a profound influence on the psyche of the Bengali people. He introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. Only a few literary giants—Shakespeare, Dante, Pushkin, and Goethe—have had as comparable an impact on a people’s language, literature, and cultural identity as Tagore has. He also culturally and politically inspired India and Bangladesh, where he remains the subject of great pride and admiration.
Tagore has the rare distinction of writing the national anthems of three countries: India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He was knighted in 1915 but resigned the honor in 1919 as a protest against British policy in Punjab.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Rabindranath Tagore
Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Smile
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Reading
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Logic, Reason, Instincts
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone;
But let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Courage
The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Spirituality
We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. Cruelty… is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us – in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Vegetarianism
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Time, Carpe-diem, Value of Time, Time Management
I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Carpe-diem
The best of us still have our aspirations for the supreme goals of life, which is so often mocked by prosperous people who now control the world. We still believe that the world has a deeper meaning than what is apparent, and that therein the human s
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Aspirations
We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Illusion
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.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Life and Living
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.
—Rabindranath Tagore
The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. It’s 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 out of them, molding them into money.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Greed, Money
Life’s errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Harmony
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Attitude, General, Adversity, Weather
The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Desire
If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Truth, Mistakes
Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Joy
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of humanity.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Children, Hope
Life is given to use, we earn it by giving it.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Service
We do not raise our hands to the void for things beyond hope.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Hope
We live in the world when we love it.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Love
The smile that flickers on baby’s lips when he sleeps.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Children
We gain freedom when we have paid the full price…
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Freedom
Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Gardening, Earth
Where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Change
With begging and scrambling we find very little, but with being true to ourselves we find a great deal more.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Being Ourselves
All the great utterances of man have to be judged not by the letter but by the spirit—the spirit which unfolds itself with the growth of life in history.
—Rabindranath Tagore
God waits to win back his own flowers as gifts from man’s hands.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Gift, Gifts
Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Topics: Time Management
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