Rabindranath Tagore's 80th Death Anniversary: 10 Quotes That Immortalise The Polymath  

Rabindranath Tagore, the first Indian to be awarded the Nobel, died on this day 80 years ago. Here are some of the greatest quotes by Tagore to remember him on his death anniversary.

Rabindranath Tagore (Image: Getty)

New Delhi: Rabindranath Tagore, the first Indian to be awarded the Nobel, died on this day 80 years ago. Poet, philosopher, playwright, artist and thinker, the polymath gave India its National Anthem and is considered one of the greatest revolutionaries the country has ever produced. 

Eight decades have passed since his death, but Tagore has remained contemporary as his writings find relevance even in today's day and time.
Tagore died on August 7, 1941, though Bengalis across the world observe the day on the 22nd day of the month of Shravan — August 8 this year — according to the Bengali calendar.

Here are some of the greatest quotes by Rabindranath Tagore to remember him on his death anniversary.

1. Truth is everywhere, therefore everything is the object of our knowledge. Beauty is omnipresent, therefore everything is capable of giving us joy.

2. When we say that beauty is everywhere we do not mean that the word ugliness should be abolished from our language, just as it would be absurd to say that there is no such thing as untruth.

3. Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous.

4. Our soul when detached and imprisoned within the narrow limits of a self loses its significance. For its very essence is unity. It can only find out its truth by unifying itself with others, and only then it has its joy.

5. Love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All.

6. There is a bond of harmony between our two eyes, which makes them act in unison. Likewise there is an unbreakable continuity of relation in the physical world between heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, as between the bass and treble notes of a piano. That is why these opposites do not bring confusion in the universe, but harmony.

7. There is no bondage so fearful as that of obscurity. It is to escape from this obscurity that the seed struggles to sprout, the bud to blossom. It is to rid itself of this envelope of vagueness that the ideas in our mind are constantly seeking opportunities to take on outward form. In the same way our soul, in order to release itself from the mist of indistinctness and come out into the open, is continually creating for itself fresh fields of action, and is busy contriving new forms of activity, even such as are not needful for the purposes of its earthly life. And why? Because it wants freedom. It wants to see itself, to realize itself.

8. Each nation must be conscious of its mission and we, in India, must realize that we cut a poor figure when we are trying to be political, simply because we have not yet been finally able to accomplish what was set before us by our providence.

9. Poetry and the arts cherish in them the profound faith of man in the unity of his being with all existence, the final truth of which is the truth of personality. It is a religion directly apprehended, and not a system of metaphysics to be analysed and argued.

10. India has proved that it has its own mind, which has deeply thought and felt and tried to solve according to its light the problems of existence. The education of India is to enable this mind of India to find out truth, to make this truth its own wherever found and to give expression to it in such a manner as only it can do.

(All quotes sourced from www.tagoreweb.in)