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.
Rabindranath TagoreRead
Compliments win friends, honesty loses them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Compliments can help build friendships, while being overly honest may drive people away.
This quote by Rabindranath Tagore highlights the delicate balance between kindness and honesty in relationships. It suggests that while flattery and compliments can foster connections and win people over, harsh truths or blunt honesty might alienate others, indicating the complexity of human interactions and the impact of our words on relationships.
Themes
ComplimentsHonestyFriendshipRelationshipsCommunication
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about building strong teams, one might say, 'Remember, compliments win friends, while honesty may sometimes lose them.'
More from Rabindranath Tagore
All quotes →Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits.
Rabindranath TagoreRead
True deliverance of man is the deliverance from Avidya i.e. ignorance. It is not in destroying anything that is positive and real, for that cannot be possible, but that which is negative, which obstructs our vision of truth.
Rabindranath TagoreRead
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
Rabindranath TagoreRead
If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
Rabindranath TagoreRead
To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.
Rabindranath TagoreRead
Similar quotes
In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.
Booker T. WashingtonRead
There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.
Barack ObamaRead
The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.
Anais NinRead
I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.
Kenya BarrisRead
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.
C. S. LewisRead
Rejoice with those who rejoice." I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.
Marilynne RobinsonRead