About Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore; born Robindronath Thakur, (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), and also known by his sobriquets Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Author of the “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse” of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India’s Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh’s Amar Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 was awarded to Rabindranath Tagore “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”
Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.
Gitanjali
There is none to count thy minutes.
Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou knowest how to wait.
Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.
We have no time to lose, and having no time, we must scramble for our chances. We are too poor to be late.
And thus it is that time goes try, while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.
At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut; but if I find that yet there is time.
Rabindranath Tagore Quotes
Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
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.
You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you.
Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
The small wisdom is like water in a glass:
clear, transparent, pure.
The great wisdom is like the water in the sea:
dark, mysterious, impenetrable.
Love’s gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.
Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of
Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.
The biggest changes in a women’s nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition.
Rabindranath Tagore’s Books
Gitanjali
Kabuliwala
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