Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Quotes On India II

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Philosopher

"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 of Indian theological literature found, that dispelled once and for all, the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently.”






Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

German Philosopher

"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 (1817-1862)

American Philosopher

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(1835-1920)

American Author

“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 combined. Even now, after a lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me and I hope it never will.”







Ken Wilber(b-1949)

American Philosopher and Author

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 inner life more comprehensive, more universal, in fact a more truly human life, again, I should point to India.







George Harrison(1943-2001)

Beatles

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(1895-1976)

Chinese writer

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."







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