39 Rabindranath Tagore Quotes on Life

Rabindranath Tagore quotes on life

8. In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless. ~ 96

11. 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. To me the verses of the Upanishads and the teachings of Buddha have ever been things of the spirit, and therefore endowed with boundless vital growth; and I have used them, both in my own life and in my preaching, as being instinct with individual meaning for me, as for others, and awaiting for their confirmation, my own special testimony, which must have its value because of its individuality.

34. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ 45

36. The wise man warns me that life is but a dewdrop on the lotus leaf. ~ 46

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

49. Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

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

51. Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

56. Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

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

73. If life's journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own. The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind. But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet, finding himself in a college class. The infant has it own joy of life because the world is not a mere road, but a home, of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. With our road that gain is at every step, for it is the road and the home in one; it leads us on yet gives us shelter.

79. In our desire for eternal life we pray for an eternity of our habit and comfort, forgetting that immortality is in repeatedly transcending the definite forms of life in order to pursue the infinite truth of life.

80. In the dualism of death and life there is a harmony. We know that the life of a soul, which is finite in its expression and infinite in its principle, must go through the portals of death in its journey to realise the infinite. It is death which is monistic, it has no life in it. But life is dualistic; it has an appearance as well as truth; and death is that appearance, that maya, which is an inseparable companion to life.

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

86. Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

88. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole.

89. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.

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

100. Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms.

102. Man's cry is to reach his fullest expression.

107. Never be afraid of the moments- thus sings the voice of the ever-lasting.

110. Obstacles are necessary companions to expression, and we know that the positive element in language is not in its obstructiveness. Exclusively viewed from the side of the obstacle, nature appears inimical to the idea of morality. But if that were absolutely true, moral life could never come to exists. Life, moral or physical, is not a completed fact, but a continual process, depending for its movement upon two contrary forces, the force of resistance and that of expression. Dividing these forces into two mutually opposing principles does not help us, for the truth dwells not in the opposition but in its continual reconciliation.

118. Taking shelter in the dead is death itself, and only taking all the risk of life to the fullest extent is living.

119. That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

122. The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

124. The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love.

125. The emancipation of our physical nature is in attaining health, of our social being in attaining goodness, and of our self in attaining love.

127. The fountain of death makes the still waters of life play.

128. The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.

131. The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

139. The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being.

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

148. The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite.

151. There are men whose idea of life is tactic, who long for its continuation after death only because of their wish for permanence and not perfection; they love to imagine that the things to which they are accustomed will persist for ever. They completely identify themselves in their minds with their fixed surroundings and with whatever they have gathered, and to have to leave these is death for them. They forget that the true meaning of living is outliving, it is ever growing out of itself.

153. 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.

157. Those institutions which are static in their nature raise walls of division; this is why, in the history of religions, priesthood has always maintained dissensions and hindered the freedom of man. But the principle of life unites, it deals with the varied, and seeks unity.

167. We believe that mere movement is life, and that the more velocity it has, the more it expresses vitality.

174. We live in the world when we love it.

186. You are invited to the festival of this world and your life is blessed.