" Rabindranath Tagore is the very heart of this country. He is the most contemporary man, and yet the most ancient too. His words are a bridge between the modern mind and the ancient most sages of the world. In particular, GITANJALI is his greatest contribution to human evolution, to human consciousness. It is one of the rarest books that has appeared in this century. Its rarity is that it belongs to the days of the UPANISHADS - near about five thousand years before GITANJALI came into existen It is a miracle in the sense that Rabindranath is not a religious person in the ordinary sense. He is one of the most progressive thinkers - untraditional, unorthodox - but his greatness consists in his childlike innocence. And because of that innocence, perhaps he was able to become the vehicle of the universal spirit, in the same way as the UPANISHADS of old are. He is a poet of the highest category, and also a mystic. Such a combination has happened only once or twice before - in Kahlil Gibran, in Friedrich Nietzsche, and in Rabindranath Tagore. With these three persons, the whole category is finished. In the long history of man, it is extraordinary…. There have been great poets and there have been great mystics. There have been great poets with a little mysticism in them, and there have been great mystics who have expressed themselves in poetry - but their poetry is not great. Rabindranath is in a strange situation.” “Rabindranath never went to any temple, never worshiped any God, was never, in a traditional way, a saint, but to me he is one of the greatest saints the world has known. His saintliness is expressed in each of his words.” “Rabindranath Tagore, although he belongs to this century, echoes thousands-of-years -old longings and dreams of the East. He belongs to the seers of the UPANISHADS. He is the only man this century has produced whose words can be compared to the five-thousand-year-old UPANISHADS. Those UPANISHADS were songs of the first seers of humanity, but it is a strange fact that truth remains the same. Everything changes, but the truth is eternal. Five thousand years of distance, but whatever Rabindranath sings, appears to be coming from the days of the UPANISHADS, of those days of humanity’s childhood - so innocent and so pure.”
