Quoted from Tagore’s own English versions: Gitanjali (1912), Stray Birds (1916) and the lectures Nationalism (1917). Numbers are poem or aphorism numbers.
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls … Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”Gitanjali, 35 (1912)
True freedom is of the mind as well as of the nation.
“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!”Gitanjali, 11 (1912)
The divine is found among working people, not shut away from them.
“The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.”Gitanjali, 69 (1912)
You are not separate from the life of the world.
“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.”Gitanjali, 1 (1912)
Being emptied is how we are filled again.
“If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.”Stray Birds, 6 (1916)
Grieving what is gone can blind you to what has arrived.
“Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves.”Stray Birds, 82 (1916)
Both living and dying can have their own beauty.
“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”Stray Birds, 75 (1916)
Often the error is in our reading, not in the world.
“Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”Stray Birds, 77 (1916)
Each new life is a vote of hope.
“Man barricades against himself.”Stray Birds, 79 (1916)
The walls we build often keep ourselves in.
“A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose.”Nationalism (1917)
Tagore warned against worshipping the nation-machine over the living society.
These circulate widely under the same name, but don’t hold up:
More famous misquotes: Quotes They Never Said
Gitanjali (Project Gutenberg) · Stray Birds (Project Gutenberg) · Rabindranath Tagore
