The world salutes India and Indian Heritage

"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 moldering 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 combined. In religion, India is the only millionaire."

- Mark Twain

 

"If there is one place on the face of this 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."

- Remain Rolland

 

"It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history (Nuclear age) the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way."

- Arnold Toynbee

 

"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

 

"Gravitation was known to the Indians before the birth of Newton. The system of blood circulation was discovered by them centuries before Harvey was heard of."

-P Johnstone

 

"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. India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings."

- William Durant

 

"From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology."

- William James

 

"There is no book in the world that is so thrilling, soul stirring and inspiring as the Upanishads.  If I were to look over the whole world to find out a country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow in some part a very paradise on earth I should point to India."

- Max Muller

 

"Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world. In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and as elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life it will be the solace of my death."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

"They were very advanced the Indian astronomers in 6000 BC.  Vedas contain an account of the dimension of Earth, Sun, Moon, Planets and Galaxies."

- Emmelin Plunret

 

"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 were known to the seers who founded the Vedas."

- Wheeler Wilcox

 

"Our present knowledge of the nervous system fits in so accurately with the internal description of the human body given in the Vedas. Then the question arises whether the Vedas are really religious books or books on anatomy of the nervous system and medicine."

-B G Rele

 

"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."

-Victor Cousin

 

"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."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"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. 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."

-Henry David Thoreau