India

“Truth alone triumphs”

Quotes
 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."
 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.“
 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,
 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
 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.“
 Mark Twain,
American Author
(1835-1920):
“This is India!
The land of dreams and romance,
of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty,
of splendor 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 a 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 tradition,
whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the
nations
– the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable
interest for alien persons,
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 all the shows of all the rest of the globe
 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
 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
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. “
 Dalai Lama,
(b-1935):

“Hindus and Buddhists, we are two sons of the

same mother."
 Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936):

“Now it is not good for the Christian's health to

hustle the Hindu brown. For the Christian riles
and the Hindu smiles and weareth the Christian
down ;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone while with
the name of the late deceased and the epitaph
drear ,
‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the east’ ".
 Apollonius Tyaneus
Greek Thinker and Traveller,
1st Century AD

"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."
 John Archibald Wheeler
Theoretical Physicist, who coined “Black Hole”
(b-1911):

“I like to think that someone will trace how the

deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece
and from there to the philosophy of our times.”
 Guy Sorman,
author of “Genius of India”:

“Temporal notions in Europe were overturned by an

India rooted in eternity.
The Bible had been the yardstick for measuring
time,
but the infinitely vast time cycles of India
suggested that the world was much older than
anything the Bible spoke of.
It seem as if the Indian mind was better
prepared for the
chronological mutations of
Darwinian evolution and astrophysics.”
 Adam Smith,
Father of economics, and author of “Wealth of
Nations”:
(1723-1790)

"The difference between the genius of the British

constitution which protects and governs North
America, and that of the mercantile company
[British East India Company] which oppresses
and domineers in the East Indies[India], cannot
perhaps be better illustrated than by the
different state of those countries."
 H.G. Wells,
Sociologist, and Historian and Author of “Time
Machine” and “War of the Worlds”
(1866-1946):

"The history of India for many centuries had

been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike
than any other history. In these favourable
conditions, they built a character - meditative
and peaceful and a nation of philosophers such
as could nowhere have existed except in India."
 Friedrich Mejer:
“It will no longer remain to be doubted that
the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece
have drawn directly from the original well of India,

that it is to the banks of the Ganges and the Indus

that our hearts feel drawn
as [if] by some hidden urge.”
 Jean-Sylvain Bailly,
French Astronomer,
(1736-1793):

“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 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.”
 George Bernard Shaw,
Irish dramatist, literary critic, socialist spokesman
(1856-1950):

“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 Creator's hand.”
 Dr David Frawley,
American Teacher, Doctor, Author, Speaker, Historian

“India possesses a great indigenous civilization

dating back to 7000 BC, such as recent
archaeological discoveries at Mehrgarh clearly
reveal. It had the most extensive urban culture in
the world in the third millennium BCE with the
many cities of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers.

When the Sarasvati river of Vedic fame dried up in

the second millennium BCE, the culture shifted east
to the more certain rivers of the Gangetic plain,
which became the dominant region of the
subcontinent.

Gone is the old idea of the Aryan invasion and an

outside basis for Indian culture. In its place is the
continuity of a civilization and its literature going
back to the earliest period of history.

Unfortunately, over the first fifty years since

Independence, India has not discovered its real
roots. Its intellectuals have mimicked Western
trends in thought. They have forgotten their own
profound modern sages like Swami Vivekananda
 Francois Gautier,
French Journalist and Writer
(b-1950-):

“Cry! O my beloved India!“

“The BJP government has fallen. You are exulting, O

Christians! You seem to forget how much this country gave
you: the first Christian community in the world, that of the
Syrian Christians, was established in Kerala in the 1st
century.”

The BJP government has fallen. You are rejoicing, O Muslims!

You seem to forget that Arab merchants came to Hindu India
long before the first Muslim invasions of the 7th century. They
were also welcomed and allowed to practise their religion in
peace and to trade as they liked.

The BJP government has fallen. You are rejoicing, O Marxists!

But do you understand that Marxism is dead all over the
world; and that even in China it is Marxism in name only, as
its government actually implements capitalist policies?

The BJP government has fallen. Your are rejoicing, O members

of the Indian intelligentsia! You think that reading the latest
New York Times bestseller, speaking polished English, and
putting down your own countrymen, specially anybody who
has a Hindu connection, makes you an intellectual. But in the