Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 7, 1861, in Calcutta [now Kolkata], India, and died on August 7, 1941, in Calcutta). The introduction of Indian culture to the West and vice versa was greatly influenced by him, and he is widely recognized as the best creative artist to emerge from early 20th-century India. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, being the first non-European to do so.

Son of religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he started writing verse at a young age and later returned to India after pursuing just part of his education in England in the late 1870s. There he completed Manasi (1890), a collection that symbolizes the development of his creativity, and released a number of poetry books in the 1880s. It includes some of his most well-known poems, many of which are in Bengali verse forms that are novel to the language, as well as some political and social satire directed at his fellow Bengalis. To oversee his family's lands in Shilaidah and Shazadpur for ten years, Tagore traveled to East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1891. There, where he frequently resided in a houseboat on the Padma River (the Ganges River's major channel), he was in frequent touch with the locals, and his empathy for them served as the foundation for a large portion of his later writing. The majority of his best short stories, which focus on "humble lives and their minor tragedies," were written in the 1890s.

He published many poetry collections, including Sonar Tari (1894; The Golden Boat), and dramas, including Chitrangada, during this time (1892; Chitra). Tagore's more than 2,000 songs, which attained significant appeal among all sections of Bengali society, are essentially untranslatable, as are his poems. Tagore aimed to combine the best aspects of Indian and Western traditions when he established Shantiniketan (literally, "Abode of Peace"), an experimental school in rural West Bengal, in 1901. At the institution, which was renamed Visva-Bharati University in 1921, he made a permanent home. His later poetry, which was first published in the West in Gitanjali (Song Offerings 1912), reflects the years of sorrow brought on by the deaths of his wife and two children between 1902 and 1907.

W.B. Yeats and André Gide praised this work, which contains Tagore's English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali lyric collections, including Gitanjali (1910), and it brought him the Nobel Prize in 1913. In 1919, as a form of protest against the Amritsar (Jallianwalla Bagh) Massacre, Tagore renounced the knighthood he had received in 1915.

Since 1912, Tagore has spent long periods outside of India, teaching and reading his works in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. He has also developed into an outspoken advocate for Indian freedom. The two Bengali novels of Tagore, Gora (1910) and Ghare-Baire (1916), which are respectively published in English as Gora and The Home and the World, are less well-known than his poems and short stories. Tagore began painting in the late 1920s when he was in his 60s, and his creations earned him a spot among India's top modern artists.

1. You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

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

3. If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.

4. 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.

5. You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

6. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

7. It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

8. Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

9. Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.

10. I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.

11. Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.

12. 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.

13. Don't limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.

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

15. A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

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

17. 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.