A reader of my blog a while ago forwarded to me the following commentary on Indian Civilisation and Heritage by a galaxy of the best brains in the world. The Copy right for these quotations belongs to my friend as I am only a reflector. Before these great men Darwin, Marx and Hawking's and their "apostles", "devotees", "believers", "followers" and "fans" foisted by the modern Oxbridge and the BBC are mere puny mediocre intellectual fraudsters deceiving history and humanity as a whole!!!
Please see below to appreciate what I am speaking about;
T. S. Eliot - great American poet, -philosopher, critic
Indian philosophers’ subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
François M Voltaire - (1694-1774) - France’s greatest writers and philosopher
I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the ganga — astronomy, astrology, spiritualism, etc. it is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the ganga 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...
Mark Twain - (1835-1910) American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer
India is the 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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - (1803-1882) great - American author, essayist, - lecturer, Unitarian minister
The Vedas taught me. in them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, and unbroken peace.
Julius R Oppenheimer (1904-1967) one of the world’s greatest physicists, known as ‘the father of the atomic bomb’
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
The Gita, the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
Albert Einstein - one of the greatest scientists, philosopher, received Nobel Prize for his ‘theory of relativity’.
We owe a lot to Indians who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have ever been made.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), - great German philosopher, poet and critic
Mankind’s origins can be traced to India, where the human mind
got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue with a simplicity, strength and sublimity which has - frankly spoken - nothing, nothing at all equivalent in our philosophical, cold European world.
The Veda was the most precious gift for which the west had ever been
indebted to the east
Friedrich Hegel - (1770-1831), great 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... India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.
India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) great 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 creator’s hand.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), one of the greatest 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.
Frederic von Schlegel (1772-1829), German writer, critic philosopher, philologist, 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 and this great 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.
The ancient Indians possessed knowledge of the true god; conceived and expressed in noble, clear and grand language…even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealization of reason, as set forth by the Greeks, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of oriental idealism, like a feeble spark in the full flood of the noonday sun.
Everything without exception is of Indian origin. Whether directly or indirectly, all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) British philosopher, mathematician best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy
The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi (intellect) of the rishis (saints) in ancient India; and science, in its most advanced stage now, is closer to Vedanta than ever before.
Fritjof Capra physicist and systems theorist, a founding director of the center for ecoliteracy, USA
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. (One Kalpa is about 4,320,000 years).
The scale of this ancient myth is indeed staggering; it has taken the human mind more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept.
H. G. wells (1866-1946), English prolific writer and philosopher
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.
Hinduism is synonymous with humanism.
That is its essence and its great liberating quality.
There is space in its philosophy for everyone, which is one reason
Why India is a home
to every single religion in the world.
Herman Hesse (1877-1962) German poet and novelist, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946
The marvel of the Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), great 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 and trivial.
What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like the light of
A higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through
purer stratum. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out,
wading through some far stratum in the sky.
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
sectarianism. It is of all 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.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) English novelist and critic and philosopher
Hinduism, the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions.
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.
Romaine Rolland (1866-1944) a great French writer, dramatist, critics, historian, Nobel laureate
Religious faith in the case of the Hinduism 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.
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.
Paul William Roberts, professor at oxford, award-winning television writer, producer, journalist, critic and novelist
The Vedas still represent eternal truth in the purest form ever written.
and they are what drew me to India in the first place, what kept me there,
and what draws me back still.
Jean-Sylvain Bailly great French astronomer who calculated the orbit for the Hailey’s comet
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 motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the tables of Cassini and Meyer (used in the18th century).
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.
Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) French mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer, a contemporary of napoleon, 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.
Brian David Josephson - (1940 - ) welsh physicist, the youngest Nobel laureate
The Vedanta and the Sankhya hold the key to the laws of mind and
thought process which is co-related to the quantum field, i.e. the operation and distribution of particles at atomic and molecular levels.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) a German scholar, poet, critic
Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans appears like a
feeble spark before the Vedanta.
A. E. George Russell (1867 - 1935) poet, artist, and mystic, a leading figure in the Irish
literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
The Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads contain such god-like fullness of wisdom on all things that I feel the authors must have looked with calm remembrance back through a thousand passionate lives, full of feverish strife for and with shadows, ere they could
have written with such certainty of things which the soul feels to be sure.
Alexander M. Kadakin - former Russian ambassador in India
India seems to be specially designed by the god to defy all prognoses and theories. My heart remains here but all my India will travel back along with me, needing no extra
space in the plane. and new ones will appear when I return.
Charles H. Townes (1925-), American, Nobel prize-winning, worked extensively during
World War II in designing radar bombing systems, invented the microwave-emitting
Indian students should value their religious culture and of course, the classical Indian culture bears importantly on the meaning of life and values. I would not separate the two. To separate science and Indian culture would be harmful. …I don't think it is
practical to keep scientific and spiritual culture separate.
Alan Watts (1915-1973) English philosopher, prolific writer
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, (one kalpa is about 4,320,000 years).
John Archibald Wheeler (1911 - 2008) American physicist, the first involved in the
theoretical development of the atomic bomb and first to coin the ‘black hole’ who later
occupies the chair that was held by Einstein
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.
It is curious that people like Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Oppenheimer were
Upanishad scholars.
Lin Yutang (1895-1976) great Chinese scholar, prolific writer
India was china’s teacher in religion and imaginative literature,
and the world’s teacher in trigonometry, quadratic
Equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian nights, animal
Fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she
inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, herder,
Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.
Erwin Schrödinger (1887--1961) Austrian physicist awarded Nobel Prize for his
invention of wave mechanics
This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of
This entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so
constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in
that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear;
‘tat tvam asi ’, this is you. or,
again, in such words as “I am in the east and the west,
I am above and below, I am this entire world.
Queen Fredericka of Greece, wife of king Paul of Greece
I envy the Indians.
while Greece is the country of my birth,
India is the country of my soul.
Pierre Sonnerat (1748 - 1814) French naturalist and author
Ancient India gave to the world its religions and
philosophies. Egypt and Greece owe India their wisdom and it is known that Pythagoras went to India to study
under Brahmins, who were the most enlightened of
human beings.
Wilhelm von Humboldt - (1767- 1835) Prussian minister of education, a brilliant linguist
and the founder of the science of general linguistics
the Gita, the most beautiful, perhaps the only true
philosophical song existing in any
known tongue.... perhaps the deepest and loftiest
thing the world has to show.
Lord Warren Hastings (1754-1826), the first governor general of British India
I do not hesitate to pronounce the Gita a performance of great originality, of sublimity of
conception, reasoning and diction almost unequalled; and a single exception, amongst
all the known religions of mankind.
Andrew Tomas (1906- 2001) an Australian UFO pioneer, author of several physics,
Astronomy and spiritual books
the atomic structure of matter is mentioned in the
Hindu treatises vaisesika and nyaya.
The yoga Vasishta says: ----- there are vast worlds
within the hollows of each atom,
multifarious as the specks in a sunbeam -----
which we have assumed now as true.
Juan Mascaro (1897 - 1987) taught at Oxford University
the greatness of the Bhagavad Gita is the greatness of the universe, but even as the wonder of the stars in heaven only reveals itself in the silence of the night, the wonder of
This poem only reveals itself in the silence of the soul.
Hun Shih (1891-1962), Chinese philosopher and author
Never before had china seen a religion so rich in imagery, so beautiful and captivating
in ritualism and so bold in cosmological and metaphysical speculations. She begged and
borrowed them all freely from this munificent Indians. China’s indebtedness to India can
never be fully told.
Dr. Carl Sagan (1934-1996) most famous modern astrophysicist
The Hinduism is the only one of the world’s greatest 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.
C E M Joad (1891-1953) British philosopher, author, teacher
The thought of the Upanishads is bold
and free, and their general conclusion is that mystical experience
is the pathway to reality?
Count Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946) great Estonian philosopher, first to conceive
and promote a planetary culture, founder of the school of wisdom
India has produced the profoundest metaphysics that we can hardly imagine of.
Victor Cousin (1792-1867) great French philosopher
When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of India, we
discover there are endless truths, 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.
Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) a great writer, socialist, George Bernard Shaw
regarded her as the ‘greatest woman public speaker of her time’
after a study of some forty years and more of the great religions of the world, I find
none so perfect, none so scientific, none so philosophical and none so spiritual than the
great religion known by the name of Hinduism.
India is the mother of all religions. in her are combined science and religion in perfect
harmony, and it is India that shall be again the spiritual mother of the world.
Dr. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) great British historian. His massive research
was published in 12 volumes between 1934 and 1961 titled as `a study of history’
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.
Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) a great Belgian writer and Nobel laureate
have we not here the whole of Darwinian evolution confirmed by geology and foreseen
at least 6,000 years ago? On the other hand, is this not the theory of? Akasa which we
more clumsily call the ether, the sole source of all substances, to which our science is
returning? But the scientific ether is not precisely the Hindu Akasa which is much more
subtle and immaterial being a sort of spiritual element or divine energy, space
uncreated, imperishable, and infinite.
David Bohm American, one of the world’s greatest quantum mechanical physicists and
philosopher
One would say atman is more like the meaning. but then what is meant would be
Brahman, I suppose; the identity of consciousness and cosmos....this claims that the
meaning and what is meant are ultimately one, which is the phrase atman equals
Brahman of classical Hindu philosophy.