He became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

“The essential harmony and beauty of the universe was best conveyed through music, could be never described by science.”

Tagore's works included numerous novels, short-stories, collection of songs, dance-drama, political and personal essays. Some prominent examples are Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World).

“Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it.”

He never ceased to search, to think and to question: The khela or play of the universe or the process at work in Nature and man that involves ceaseless change through time but which also remains tuned to an underlying and unchanging harmony.

Tagore's life was tragic- he lost virtually his entire family and was devastated to witness Bengal's decline-but his life's work endured in the form of his poetry and the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.

Tagore took an interest in science in his last years, writing Visva-Parichay (a collection of essays) in 1937. He explored biology, physics, and astronomy.

"Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror."

In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst set up the Institute for Rural Reconstruction (which Tagore later renamed Shriniketan-"Abode of Peace") in Surul. He recruited scholars, donors, and officials from many countries to help the Institute use schooling to "free villages from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance" by "vitalizing knowledge".

“Beauty harmonises in itself the limit and the beyond, the law and the liberty.”

His life was a search for unity, for stability of belief and moral principle to give meaning and order to everything he did.

He tried to have any effect on the so called "progress" of modern civilization towards what he feared would be self-destruction.

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

After extended suffering, Tagore died on 7 August 1941 (22 Shravan 1348) in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion in which he was raised.

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

Mind Without Fear

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; 

Where words come out from the depth of truth; 

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; 

Where the clear stream of reason 
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; 

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--- 

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Patience

If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. 
I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil 
and its head bent low with patience. 

The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, 
and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky. 

Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds' nests, 
and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.

Beggarly Heart

When the heart is hard and parched up, 
come upon me with a shower of mercy. 

When grace is lost from life, 
come with a burst of song. 

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from 
beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest. 

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, 
break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king. 

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, 
thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

Innermost One

He it is, the innermost one, 
who awakens my being with his deep hidden touches. 

He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes 
and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart 
in varied cadence of pleasure and pain. 

He it is who weaves the web of this maya 
in evanescent hues of gold and silver, blue and green, 
and lets peep out through the folds his feet, 
at whose touch I forget myself. 

Days come and ages pass, 
and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, 
in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow.