Quotes on India

Albert Einstein
(1879 -1955):

“When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.”

"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made. “

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

J. Robert Oppenheimer,
American nuclear physicist
(1904-1967):

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. . . . Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.“

Oppenheimer "the father of the atomic bomb" quoting from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita upon witnessing the mushroom cloud resulting from the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb in New Mexico, U.S.A., on July 16, 1945.

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries. “

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Victor Cousin,
French Philosopher
(1792-1867):

"When we read the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East – above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe – we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East,and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.“

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hu Shih,
former Ambassador of China to USA
(1891-1962):

"India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Arnold Joseph Toynbee,
British Historian
(1889-1975):

"It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending, if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race.

At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Will Durant,
American historian,
(1885-1981):

"India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages; she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all".

“Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoilation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sir William Jones,
Jurist,
(1746-1794):

“…The Sanskrit language is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.

“... a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without first believing them to have sprung from some common source... ” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Philosopher
(1803-1882):

"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.“

“The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil.

It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles.

The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles. ...all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ...cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony”

“When India was explored, and the wonderful riches of Indian theological literature found, that dispelled once and for all, the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation.

- Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arthur Schopenhauer,
German Philosopher
(1788-1860):

"In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life – it will be the solace of my death.”

“It is the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.”

“I believe that the influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Henry David Thoreau,
American Philosopher
(1817-1862):

“…In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmological philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.”

“…Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of the sectarianism. It is of ages, climes, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I am at it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ken Wilber
American Philosopher and Author
(b-1949):

“Larry [Warchowski] is just about as philosophically /spiritually well read as anyone you're likely to find, and The Matrix films are a stunning tribute to that fact.

Larry said that when he found Ken's work, "It was like Schopenhauer discovering the Upanishads."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Max Muller,
(1823-1900):

"India, what can it teach us?,

"If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow, in some parts a very paradise on earth, I should point to India.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most developed some of it choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and has found solutions of some of them which will deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India.

And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, who have been nurtured most exclusively on the thoughts of the Greeks and Romans and of the Semitic race and the Jewish may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more comprehensive, more universal, in fact a more truly human life, again, I should point to India".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says:

"Man must have an original cradle land whence the peopling of the earth was brought about by migration. As to man’s cradle land, there have been many theories but the weight of evidence is in favour of Indo-Malaysia.”

"If there is a country on earth which can justly claim the honour of having been the cradle of the Human race or at least the scene of primitive civilization, the successive developments of which carried into all parts of the ancient world and even beyond, the blessings of knowledge which is the second life of man, that country is assuredly India.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

George Harrison,
Beatles
(1943 - 2001):

"For every human there is a quest to find the answer to why I am here, who am I, where did I come from, where am I going. For me that became the most important thing in my life. Everything else is secondary."

"Here everybody is vibrating on a material level, which is nowhere. Over there [India], they have this great feeling of something else that's just spiritual going on. “

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lin Yutang,
Chinese writer,
(1895-1976):

“India was China’s teacher in religion and imaginative literature,and world’s teacher in Trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess as well as in philosophy, and she inspired Boccasccio, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Emerson."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
Author and Philosopher,
(1694-1778):

"It does not behove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indian and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aldous Huxley,
English novelist
(1894-1963):

“The Bhagavad-Gita is one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the perennial philosophy ever to have been done. Hence its enduring value, not only for the Indians, but also for all mankind. It is perhaps the most systematic spiritual statement of the perennial philosophy.”

FYI: There are many external links (text with blue color) in the post, please use them for more information and to check for terminologies.