90 Quotes About India That Will Will Make You Fall In Love With This Country
Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever walked upon this earth in flesh and blood.
~~~ Einstein (said about Gandhi)
When we read with attention 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.
~~~ Victor Cousin (French philosopher)
Soil of Ancient India, cradle of humanity, hail! Hail, venerable and efficient nurse whom centuries of brutal invasions have not yet burned under the dust of oblivion! Hail, farther land of faith, of love, of poetry and of science! May we hail a revival of thy past in our West in future!
~~~ Louis Francois Jacolliot
India contains the whole history of philosophy in a nutshell.
~~~ Victor Cousin ( French philosopher)
Their (Indian philosopher’s) subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
~~~ Thomas Stearns Eliot (American poet & playwright)
I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, — astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis,..
It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry…But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not been long established in Europe…
~~~ Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (French writer and philosopher)
There is a striking resemblance between the equivalence of mass and energy symbolized by Shiva’s cosmic dance and the Western theory, first expounded by Einstein, which calculates the amount of energy contained in a subatomic particle by multiplying its mass by the square of the speed of light : E=MC2 .
~~~ Richard Waterstone (Author & Journalist)
The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed. These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas.
Dr.Carl Sagan (astrophysicist)
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value, a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions, and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Appollnius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
~~~ Pierre Simon de Laplace ( French mathematician & philosopher)
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
~~~ Albert Einstein (German Physicist)
According to me, the influence of Sanskrit literature on our time will not be lesser than what was in the 16th century Greece’s influence on Renaissance. One day, India’s wisdom will flow again on Europe and will totally transform our knowledge and thought.
~~~ Arthur Schopenhauer(German philosopher)
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.
~~~Sir William Jones (English scholar)
Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be law or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and instructive materials of the history of man are treasured up in India and India only.
~~~ Friedrich Maximilian Müeller ( German philologist )
The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive, when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrances.
~~~ Lord Warren Hastings ( First Governor General of British India)
India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples.
~~~ Sri Aurobindo (Indian philosopher)
I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestry. Rome went; Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation.
~~~ Mahatma Gandhi
India is eternal. Though the beginnings of her numerous civilizations go so far back in time that they are lost in the twilight of history, she has the gift of perpetual youth. Her culture is ageless and is as relevant to this present 20th century as it was to the 20th century before Christ.
~~~ Nani Ardeshir Palkhiwala ( Indian lawyer & philanthropist)
The strength of Hinduism lies in its infinite adaptability to the infinite diversity of human character and human tendencies. It has its highly spiritual and abstract side suited to the philosopher, its practical to the man of the world, its aesthetic and ceremonial side attuned to the man of the poetic feeling and imagination; and its quiescent contemplative aspect that has its appeal for the man of peace and the lover of seclusion.
~~~Sir Monier Williams (Indologist)
How glorious the epoch that then presented itself to my study and comprehension! I made tradition speak from the temple’s recess. I enquired of monuments and ruins, I questioned the Vedas whose pages count their existence by thousands of years and whence enquiring youth imbibed the science of life long before Thebes of the hundred gates or Babylon the great had traced our their foundations.
~~~ Louis Francois Jacolliot
India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most astrictive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!
~~~ Mark Twain (American writer)
We of the Occident (west) are about to arrive at crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India hundreds of years before Christ.
~~~ Heinrich Zimmer
The Portuguese, Dutch and English have been for a long time year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have been all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise, but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.
~~~ Henrich Heine (German poet)
India is not only the heir of her own religious traditions; she is also the residuary legatee of the Ancient Mediterranean World’s religious traditions. Religion cuts far deeper, and, at the religious level, India has not been a recipient; she has been a giver. About half the total number of the living higher religions are of Indian origin.
~~~Arnold Joseph Toynbee (British historian)
It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such unquestionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future.
~~~ Will Durant (American philosopher)
If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!
~~~ Romaine Rolland (French writer)
Our sublimest delusion is that India is backward. This predicates, of course, that we are progressive. If backwardness and progress depend on the rate at which one can gobble up vanities perhaps India does not need our aid…..India’s devotion to being good rather than being clever comes nearer the heart of a true civilization. Cleverness dies on the tongue like a social pleasantry, goodness echoes round the universe in an un extinguishable reality. We in the West are too busy to see that science without soul is like words without meaning.
India’s greatness is in her humility; her weakness is her strength. She is both wiser and more effective than the West, for she does not declare that reform is not a new shirt on Sunday morning but a clean heart at the Throne of Grace. Justice without spirit of justice is as much of an achievement as a river without its water.
She is grave and old and stupendous. Her accents are for the calm and gracious. Her temples are laden with symbolism….and internal beauties. It is true, that India is royal…India has been royal at heart from her very foundations of her memory.
~~~ W. J. Grant
Hinduism is a living organism liable to growth and decay subject to the laws of Nature. One and indivisible at the root, it has grown into a vast tree with innumerable branches. The changes in the season affect it. It has its autumn and its summer, its winter and its spring. It is, and is not, based on scriptures. It does not derive its authority from one book.
~~~ Mahatma Gandhi
Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another…But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood….. Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist… Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live….!
~~~Swami Vivekananda (Indian philosopher)
And then India appears to me in all the living power of her originality — I traced her progress in the expansion of her enlightenment over the world — I saw her giving her laws, her customs, her morale, her religion to Egypt, to Persia, to Greece and Rome — I saw Jaiminy and Veda Vyasa precede Socrates and Plato, and Krishna, the son of the Virgin Devajani precede the son of the Virgin of Bethelehem.
~~~ Louis Francois Jacolliot
India is a vast network of sacred places. The entire country is a sacred land. The sacrality of the land of India, is what, still today, gives a sense of unity to this country of so many religions, cultures, races and factions.
~~~ Roger Housden
In the literature of Asia is a great poetry. There is also profound wisdom and some very difficult metaphysics…Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read little poetry too; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility.
~~~ Thomas Stearns Eliot (American poet & playwright)
During the early life of a Nation, religion is an essential for the binding together of the individuals who make the nation. India was born, as it were, in the womb of Hinduism, and her body was for long shaped by that religion. Religion is a binding force, and India has had a longer binding together by religion than any other Nation in the world, as she is the oldest of the living Nations.
~~~Annie Besant (English theologiest)
India is not an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay
~~~ Shashi Tharoor (Indian author . In his ‘The Great Indian Novel’)
The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators hand.
~~~ George Bernard Shaw
India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soul.
~~~ Mark Twain
To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.
It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness.
~~~ Alan Watts (English philosopher)
In Hinduism, there can be as many spiritual paths as there are spiritual aspirants & similarly there can really be as many Gods as there are devotees to suit the moods, feelings, emotions & social background of the devotees.
~~~ Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Bengali Saint)
Time, for example, is intimately connected with the goddess Kali, which partly accounts for her destructive nature. Energy — in Einstein’s equation, E=MC2 is personified in India as Shakti in her various guises.
~~~ Roger Housden (American writer)
The whole edifice of Indian civilization is imbued with spiritual meaning. The close interdependence and perfect harmonization of the two serve to counteract the natural tendency of Indian philosophy to become recondite and esoteric, removed from life and the task of the education of society. In the Hindu world, the folklore and popular mythology carry the truths and teachings of the philosophers to the masses. In this symbolic form the ideas do not have to be watered down to be popularized. The vivid, perfectly appropriate pictorial script preserves the doctrines without the slightest damage to their sense.
~~~ Heinrich Zimmer (German Indologist)
This is indeed India!
The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined.
~~~ Mark Twain
It is important to appreciate that the historical achievements in India in critical reasoning, public deliberation and analytical scrutiny as well as in science and mathematics, architecture, medicine, painting and music, are products of Indian society — involving both the Hindus and non-Hindus, and including the skeptical as well as the religious.
~~~ Amartya Sen (Indian economist)
By what strange social alchemy has India subdued her conquerors, transforming them to her very self and substance….. ? Why is it that her conquerors have not been able to impose on her their language, their thoughts and customs, except in superficial ways?
~~~ Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Indian philosopher & scholar)
Peaceful Indians,… did the rumor of your riches have to penetrate a clime in which artificial needs know no bounds? Soon, new foreigners reached your shores; inconvenient guests, everything they touched belonged to them…. If the British …neglect any longer to enrich Europe’s scholars with the Sanskrit scriptures…they will bear the shame of having sacrificed honor, probity, and humanity to the vile love for gold and money, without human knowledge having derived the least lustre, the least growth from their conquests.
~~~ Anquetil Duperron (French Orientalist)
India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border!
~~~ Hu Shih (former Ambassador of China to USA)
It has been my long-standing conviction that India is like a donkey carrying a sack of gold — the donkey does not know what it is carrying but is content to go along with the load on its back. The load of gold is the fantastic treasure — in arts, literature, culture, and some sciences like Ayurvedic medicine — which we have inherited from the days of the splendor that was India.
~~~ Nani Ardeshir Palkhiwala ( Indian lawyer & philanthropist)
The multiplicity of the manifestations of the Indian genius as well as their fundamental unity gives India the right to figure on the first rank in the history of civilized nations. Her civilization, spontaneous and original, unrolls itself in a continuous time across at least thirty centuries, without interruption, without deviation. Ceaselessly in contact with foreign elements which threatened to strangle her, she persevered victoriously in absorbing them, assimilating them and enriching herself with them. Thus she has seen the Greeks, the Scythians, the Afghans, the Mongols to pass before her eyes in succession and is regarding with indifference the Englishmen — confident to pursue under the accidence of the surface the normal course of her high destiny.
~~~ Sylvain Levi (French Orientalist)
When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific’,it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation. Quite apart from the charm of the new and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience and thus satisfies the scientific need for ‘facts’; and, besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed of possibilities.
~~~ Carl Gustav Jung (German Yogic teacher)
We do not yet realize that while we are turning upside down the material world of the East with our technical proficiency, the East with its psychic proficiency, is throwing our spiritual world into confusion. We have never yet hit upon the thought that while we are overpowering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold upon us from within.
~~~ Carl Gustav Jung (German Yogic teacher)
Very few travelers have sought to understand India, very few have submitted to the labor necessary to a knowledge of her past splendor, looking only at the surface they have ever denied them and with an unreasoning confidence of criticism that made them the easy victims of ignorance.
~~~ Louis Francois Jacolliot
Enter Hinduism’s myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never ending prayer wheels. It is obtuse to confuse Hinduism’s images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are ‘runways’ from which the sense-laden human spirit can rise for its “flight of the alone to the Alone. Even village priest will frequently open their temple ceremonies with the following beloved invocation:
O Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations:
Thou art everywhere, but I worship you here;
Thou art without form, but I worship you in these forms;
Thou needest no praise, yet I offer you these prayers and salutations,
Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations.
~~~ Huston Smith (American professor)
Going forward, you have a broad and beautiful street, full of rows of fine houses and streets of the sort I have described, and it is to be understood that the houses belong to men rich enough to afford such. In this street live many merchants, and there you will find all sorts of rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls, and seed pearls, and cloths, and every other sort of thing there is on earth and that you may wish to buy
~~~ Domingos Paes (Portuguese traveler who visited Hampi during (AD 1520–22) during the reign of Vijayanagar Empire)
In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth. but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing.
~~~ Apollonius Tyanaeus ( Greek Thinker and Traveler)
The strength of Hinduism lies in its infinite adaptability to the infinite diversity of human character and human tendencies. It has its highly spiritual and abstract side suited to the philosopher, its practical to the man of the world, its aesthetic and ceremonial side attuned to the man of the poetic feeling and imagination; and its quiescent contemplative aspect that has its appeal for the man of peace and the lover of seclusion.
~~~ Sir Monier Monier-Williams (Indologist)
The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.
~~~ Dr.Carl Sagan (astrophysicist)
Our present knowledge of the nervous system fits in so accurately with the internal description of the human body given in the Vedas (5000 years ago). Then the question arises whether the Vedas are really religious books or books on anatomy of the nervous system and medicine.
~~~ Rele (Jewish writer)
Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
~~~ Alfred North Whitehead ( British mathematician)
It is not only a country and something geographical, but the home and the youth of the soul, the everywhere and nowhere, the oneness of all times.
~~~ Herman Hesse (German poet and novelist)
When Confucius and the Indian Scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of. It is only within this century (in the 1800s) that England and America discovered that their nursery tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are therefore the property of all the nations.
~~~ Emerson (American philosopher)
The Hindu genius is a love for abstraction and, at the same time, a passion for the concrete image. At times it is rich, at others prolix. It has created the most lucid and the most instinctive art. It is abstract and realistic, sexual and intellectual, pedantic and sublime. It lives between extremes, it embraces the extremes, rooted in the earth and drawn to an invisible beyond.
~~~ Octovio Paz (Mexican Nobel Prize laureate in Literature)
A special charm of studying Indian philosophy today is that it is more truly Western, in the modern, scientific sense, than any system of philosophy that the West has produced. Whereas Western rationalism has broken down under the impact of scientific discoveries, Indian thought cheerfully rides the crest of the wave, and is only pushed higher by every new scientific finding.
~~~J. Donald Walters ( singer & composer)
Precious stones or durable materials — gold, silver, bronze, marble, onyx or granite — have been used by ancient people in an attempt to immortalize themselves. Not so however the ancient Vedic Aryans (Indians). They turned to what may seem the most volatile and insubstantial material of all — the spoken word …The pyramids have been eroded by the desert wind, the marble broken by earthquakes, and the gold stolen by robbers, while the Veda is recited daily by an unbroken chain of generations, traveling like a great wave through the living substance of mind…
~~~ Dr.Jean LeMee (French author)
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 self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history , the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together in to a single family.
~~~Arnold Joseph Toynbee (British historian)
India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.
~~~ Rabindranath Tagore (Indian poet & philosopher)
Yoga, as a science of achieving this transformation of finite man into the infinite One, has to be recognized as something intrinsically Indian or, as ‘a specific dimension of the Indian mind.
Yoga constitutes a characteristic dimension of the Indian mind, to such a point that whatever Indian religion and culture have made their way, we also find a more or less pure form of Yoga. In India, Yoga was adopted and valorized by all religious movements, whether Hinduist or ‘heretical. The various Christian or syncretistic Yogas of modern India constitutes another proof that Indian religious experience finds the yogic methods of ‘meditation’ and ‘concentration’ a necessity.
~~~ Mircea Eliade (Romanin philospoher,author)
It is certainly true that Hinduism has provided the broad cultural and religious framework that has held India together despite its astonishing linguistic, ethnic and political diversity and divisions. Hinduism is as essential for an understanding of Indian culture and civilization.
~~~ Dr.Karan Singh (Indian Diplomat & politician)
India, has accomplished in the field of spirituality what, in the world of finance, the free market (as opposed to a controlled economy) has succeeded in doing:The individual seeker has been left free to explore and develop his own spiritual potentials. Other scriptures have hinted at the deeper truths of inward religion. But the priests in every religion seldom quote those passages, which they rightly see as threatening to their institutional preeminence.
~~~ J. Donald Walters
Indeed, if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozites more than two thousand years before the existence of Spinoza; and Darwinians may centuries before Darwin; and evolutionists many centuries before the doctrine of evolution had been accepted by the scientists of our time, and before any word like ‘evolution’ existed in any language of the world.
~~~ Sir Monier Monier-Williams (British Indologist)
The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the tables of Cassine and Meyer (used in the 19-th century). The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as the discovered by Tycho Brahe — a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also to the Arabs who followed the calculations of the school… The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest and that from which the Egyptians, Greek, Romans and — even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge.
~~~Jean Sylvain Bailly (French astronomer)
Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all. Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India….This is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up like a new intellectual continent to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusive Western thing.
~~~ Will Durant (American philosopher)
We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity….We know that all peoples came there to draw the elements of their knowledge … India, in her splendor, gave religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their fables and their wisdom.
~~~ Pierre Sonnerat (French naturalist & author)
She (India) has left indelible imprints on one fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has the right to reclaim … her place amongst the great nations summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity. From Persia to the Chinese sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to Islands of Java and Borneo, India has propagated her beliefs, her tales, and her civilization!
~~~ Sylvia Levi
Almost all the theories, religious, philosophical, and mathematical, taught by the Pythagoreans were known in India in the sixth century B.C.
~~~ Professor H. G. Rawlinson
There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.
~~~ Keith Bellows (Vice-President, National Geographic Society)
Towns and villages have inner gates; the walls are wide and high; the streets and lanes are torturous, and the roads winding. The thoroughfares are are dirty and the stalls arranged on both sides of the road with appropriate signs. Butchers, fishers, dancers, executioners and scavengers, and so on, have their abodes without the city. In coming and going these persons are bound to keep on the left side of the road till they arrive at their homes. Their houses are surrounded by low walls and form the suburbs. The earth being soft and muddy, the walls of the town are mostly built of bricks or tiles. The different buildings have the same form as those in China; rusher of dry branches, or tiles or boards are used for covering them. The walls are covered with lime and mud, mixed with cow dung for purity. At different seasons, flowers are scattered about. Such are some of their different customs.
~~~ Huen Tsiang (Chinese traveler visited India 629–645 A.D.)
Besides the discoverers of geometry and algebra, the constructors of human speech, the parents of philosophy, the primal expounders of religion, the adepts in psychological and physical science, how even the greatest of our biological and theologians seem dwarfed!
Name of us any modern discovery, and we venture to say that Indian history need not long be searched before the prototype will be found on record. Here we are with the transit of science half accomplished, and all our Vedic ideas in process of readjustment to the theories of force correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution. And here, to mock our conceit, our apprehension, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ:
The first germ of life was developed by water and heat. Water ascends towards the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rains are born the plants, and from the plants, animals.
~~~ Louis Francois Jacolliot (French diplomat)
It is impossible not to be astonished by India. Nowhere on Earth does humanity present itself in such a dizzying, creative burst of cultures and religions, races and tongues. Enriched by successive waves of migration and marauders from distant lands, every one of them left an indelible imprint which was absorbed into the Indian way of life. Every aspect of the country presents itself on a massive, exaggerated scale, worthy in comparison only to the superlative mountains that overshadow it. It is this variety which provides a breathtaking ensemble for experiences that is uniquely Indian. Perhaps the only thing more difficult than to be indifferent to India would be to describe or understand India completely. There are perhaps very few nations in the world with the enormous variety that India has to offer. Modern day India represents the largest democracy in the world with a seamless picture of unity in diversity unparalleled anywhere else.
~~~A Rough Guide to India (Travel guide book)
At its starting point in India, the birthplace of races and religions, the womb of the world.
~~~ Jules Michelet ( French writer)
So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
~~~ Mark Twain (American writer)
Compared to Islam and Christianity, Hinduism’s doctrines are extraordinarily fluid, and multiform. India deals in images and metaphors. Restless, subtle and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by too stringent definition. It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors and figures.
It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the divine within the limits of a logical phrase.
~~~Sir Charles Eliot ( British diplomat )
The Hindu understanding of the universe has often been misunderstood as bizarre and primitive. The Hindu imagery is in fact a sophisticated iconography conveying universal religious truths only now beginning to be understood in the West.
~~~ Alistair Shearer
India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt — more of the bliss that is man’s final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religious and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture.
~~~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German philosopher)
Where can we look for sages like those whose systems of philosophy were prototypes of those of Greece: to whose works Plato, Thales and Pythagorus were disciples?
Where do I find astronomers whose knowledge of planetary systems yet excites wonder in Europe as well as the architects and sculptors whose works claim our admiration, and the musicians who could make the mind oscillate from joy to sorrow, from tears to smile with the change of modes and varied intonation?
~~~Colonel James Todd (American pioneer)
This is the ancient land, where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country… Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the feet of the greatest sages that ever lived… Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal fountains that are behind, and after that look forward, march forward, and make India brighter, greater, much higher, than she ever was.
~~~ Swami Vivekananda (Indian philosopher)
Another important Vedantic concept is that all human beings, because of their shared spirituality, are members of a single family. The Upanishads have an extraordinary phrase for the human race, ‘Amritasya putrah’ (Children of immortality), because we carry within our consciousness the light and the power of the Brahman regardless of race, colour, creed, sex, caste or nationality. That is the basis of the concept of human beings as an extended family — ‘Vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ — which is engraved on the first gate into our Parliament House.
~~~ Dr.Karan Singh (Indian Diplomat & politician)
I shall now speak of the knowledge of the Hindus…of their subtle discoveries even more ingenious than those of the Greeks and Babylonians — of their rational system of mathematics or of their method of calculation which no word can praise strongly enough — I mean the system using the nine symbols. If these things were known by the people who think that they alone have mastered the sciences because they speak Greek, they would perhaps be convinced that every folk, not only Greeks, but men of a different tongues, know something as well as they.
~~~ Severus Sebokbt (Bishop ,Syrian astronomer)
Precious stones or durable materials — gold, silver, bronze, marble, onyx or granite — have been used by ancient people in an attempt to immortalize themselves. Not so however the ancient Vedic Aryans (Indians). They turned to what may seem the most volatile and insubstantial material of all — the spoken word …The pyramids have been eroded by the desert wind, the marble broken by earthquakes, and the gold stolen by robbers, while the Veda is recited daily by an unbroken chain of generations, traveling like a great wave through the living substance of mind…
~~~ Dr.Jean LeMee (French author)
We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff.
In India, our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought
~~~ Arthur Schopenhauer(German philosopher)
After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
~~~ W. Heisenberg (German Physicist)
With one foot grounded in time-honored traditions and the other fervently striding into the entrepreneurial e-age, India embraces diversity passionately as few other countries on earth could.
~~~ Lonely Planet (Travel guide book)
No other country has lived with so complicated a past so equably, assimilating everything that has happened to it, obliterating naught, so that not even the intricate histories of European states have produced such a rich pattern as that bequeathed by the Mauryas, the Ashokas, the Pahlavas, the Guptas, the Chalykyas, the Hoysalas, the Pandyas, the Cholas, the Mughals, and the British — to identify a few of the people that have shaped India’s inheritance.
Religion, flourishes here as it does nowhere else. Other lands may surrender themselves totally to a particular faith, but in India most creeds are deeply rooted and acknowledged fervently. Virtually the whole population practices some form of devotion. The Indian without the slightest feeling for the divine, without a spiritual dimension to his life, is exceedingly rare.
Incomparable and inimitable she is, India is also our great paradigm.
~~~ Geoffrey Moorhouse (Author)
This country was anciently so renowned for knowledge and wisdom that the philosophers of Greece did not disdain to travel thither for their improvement.
~~~William Macintosh
It’s your turn now, do you have a quote about India that depicts it’s culture, history, and uniqueness that inspired you? Please share.
