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

Rabindranath Tagore (attributed)

Literature

The story behind the card

The line is widely credited to Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet, songwriter and educator, but no one has yet traced it to one of his own books. Quotation collections point to a 1968 anthology, Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, which names no original work. It does fit the life he led. In 1901 he opened a small school at Santiniketan, which grew into Visva-Bharati University in 1921; in 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; and he travelled to more than thirty countries on five continents.

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Rabindranath Tagore (atfedilir)

Söz yaygın olarak Bengalli şair, besteci ve eğitimci Rabindranath Tagore'a (1861–1941) mal edilir, ama bugüne dek kendi kitaplarından birinde bulunamadı. Alıntı derlemelerinin gösterdiği kaynak, 1968'de yayımlanan Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore adlı bir seçkidir ve orada da özgün eser belirtilmez. Yine de söz onun yaşadığı hayata çok uyar. Tagore 1901'de Santiniketan'da küçük bir okul açtı; bu okul 1921'de Visva-Bharati Üniversitesi'ne dönüştü. 1913'te Nobel Edebiyat Ödülü'nü alan ilk Avrupalı olmayan yazar oldu ve beş kıtada otuzdan fazla ülkeyi dolaştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Rabindranath Tagore
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