"We owe a lot to Indians who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"Land
of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech,
grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that men
with intellectual bent desire to see and having seen once even by a
glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the
globe combined."
-------- T. S. Eliot
" Indian philosophers' subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys."
George Bernard Shaw, (1856-1950) Dramatist, Nobel Laureate in Literature
"The
Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of
life. We western veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of
India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators
hand. "
Francois Marie Voltaire (1694-1774) France's greatest writers and philosophers
" I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganga --- astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc."
"
It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least
Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga (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..."
H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher
There is space in its philosophy for everyone,
which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.
"Wherever we direct our attention to Hindu literature, the notion of infinity presents itself."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American author, essayist, lecturer, philosopher, Unitarian minister
"I
owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. 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."
George Bernard Shaw
"This
makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one
transcendent God includes all possible gods. In fact Hinduism is so
elastic and so subtle that the most profound Methodist, and crudest
idolater, are equally at home with it."
"In
the history of the world, the Vedas fill a gap which no literary work
in any other language could fill. I maintain that to everybody who cares
for himself, for his ancestors, for his intellectual development, a
study of the Vedic literature is indeed indispensable. "
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher and writer
"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; and it will
be the solace of my death. They are the product of the highest wisdom."
"Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries."
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher
"India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge."
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher
"It
strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the
treasures of Indian literature, that a land so rich in intellectual
products and those of the profoundest order of thought..."
Roger-Pol Droit French philosopher, and Le Monde journalist,
"The
Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy that Demetrios Galianos had even
translated the Bhagavad-Gita" . There is absolutely not a shadow of a
doubt that the Greeks knew all about Indian philosophy."
Frederich von Schlegel, (1772-1829), German philosopher, critic, and writer, the most prominent founder of German Romanticism
"There
is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the
philosophical precision of Sanskrit," adding that " India is not only at
the origin of everything she is superior in everything, intellectually,
religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in
comparison."
----- Voltaire, (1694-1774), France's greatest writers and philosophers
"the Veda was the most precious gift for which the West had ever been indebted to the East."
The Upanishads
As is the human body, so is the cosmic body
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm..
As is the atom, so is the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead, British Mathematician
The
vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in
ancient India; and science, in its most advanced stage now, is closer
to Vedanta than ever before.
To
the Indian Rishis the divine play was the evolution of the cosmos
through countless aeons. There is an infinite number of creations in an
infinite universe. The Rishis gave the name kalpa to the unimaginable
span of time between the beginning and the end of creation.
Herman Hesse (1877-1962) German poet and novelist, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 says:
"The
marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's
wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion."
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American Philosopher, writer, Unitarian, social critic, transcendentalist:
"In
the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern
world and its literature seems puny."
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, (1850-1919) famous American poet and journalist
"
India - the land of Vedas, the remarkable works contains not only
religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has
proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all are known to
the seers who founded the Veda.
Hans Torwesten, German philosopher and writer
The
Vedas and the Upanishads are India's proudest and most ancient
possessions. They are the world's oldest intellectual legacies. They are
the only composition in the universe invested with Divine origin, and
almost Divine sanctity. They are said to emanate from God, and are held
to be the means for attaining God. Their beginnings are not known. They
have been heirlooms of the Hindus from generation to generation from
time immemorial.
"The
Vedic literature opens to us a chapter in what has been called the
education of the human race, to which we can find no parallel anywhere
else."
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, (1850-1919) famous American poet and journalist
"
India - the land of Vedas, the remarkable works contains not only
religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has
proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all are known to
the seers who founded the Vedas."
"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."
------ Aldous Huxley
"Hinduism, the perennial philosophy" that is at the core of all religions.
founder
of German Romanticism
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher and writer
"How
entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the
Vedas! How is every one, who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin
has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred by that spirit
to the very depth of his Soul !"
Romain Rolland (1866-1944) French Nobel laureate, Historian
"Religious
faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter
to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for
the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to
take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic
and atheist may attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be
surprising to religious believers in the West, but it is an integral
part of Vedantic belief."
Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) Nuclear physicist, philosopher, developer of the atomic bomb
"The Gita, the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue."
H. G. Wells (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher
Hinduism is synonymous with humanism. That is its essence and its great liberating quality."
Lord Curzon (1859-1925) British statesman, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, and later became chancellor of Oxford University
" India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind,
than any other terrestrial unit in the universe."
William Butler Yeats (1856-1939) Irish poet, dramatist, and essayist and Nobel Laureate
"It was only my first meeting with the Indian philosophy that confirmed my
vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless."
Mark Tully former BBC correspondent in India, author
But I do profoundly believe that India needs to be able to say with pride,
"Yes, our civilization has a Hindu base to it."
Paul William Roberts Professor at Oxford , award-winning television writer, producer, journalist, critic and novelist.
"India is the only country that feels like home to me,
the only country whose airport tarmac I have ever kissed upon landing."
"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." the Jews derived from
the Hindus their knowledge."
Pierre Simon de Laplace ( 1749-1827) French mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer, a contemporary of Napoleon. Laplace is best known for his nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.
"
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."