"From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion. By:-Swami Vivekanand "I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there." By:-Swami Vivekanand "Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realizing not in believing, but in being and becoming." By:-Swami Vivekanand " From a clear knowledge of the BhagavadBy:-Gita all the goals of human existence become fulfilled. BhagavadBy:-Gita is the manifest quintessence of all the teachings of the Vedic scriptures." By:- Sri Adi Sankaracharya “The Gita is the greatest gospel of spiritual works ever yet given to the race." By:-Aurobindo I go into the Upanishads to ask questions. By:-Niels Bohr Hindu polytheism isn't really polytheism but monotheism in disguise. By:-Richard Dawkins I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul. By:-Bharati Mukherjee Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 B.C.E. or 15,000 B.C.E., they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world. They tell us something of the early growth of the human mind of which we find no trace anywhere else. By:-Max Muller The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe. By:-Romain Rolland "I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true." By:-Swami Vivekananda When the Hindu calculation of the present age of the earth and the expanding universe could make Professor Holmes so astonished, the precision with which the Hindu calculation regarding the age of the entire Universe was made would make any man spellbound. By:-Arthur Holmes Many Hindu intellectuals are just not able to comprehend the fact that there is no human aspiration or experience which lies outside the range of Hinduism; it provides for even demonBy:-Gods. In contrast, all religions are in the nature of sects, though they cannot be so defined because of their insistence on their separateness and, indeed, hostility to Hinduism. By:-Girilal Jain I think I have understood Hinduism correctly when I say that it is eternal, allBy:-embracing and flexible enough to suit all situations. By:-Mahatma Gandhi I am a proud staunch Sanatani Hindu. By:-Mahatma Gandhi Hindu Dharma is like a boundless ocean teeming with priceless gems. The deeper you dive the more treasures you find. By:-Mahatma Gandhi "Vedanta teaches that consciousness is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves." By:-Erwin Schrödinger Hinduism at its best has spoken the only relevant truth about the way to selfBy:-realization in the full sense of the word. By:-Count Hermann Keyserling "Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that all men 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." By:-Mark Twain Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries. By:-Julius Robert Oppenheimer It was my advanced research in physics that had started me on a spiritual quest. It culminated in me accepting the nonBy:-dualism or absolute monism of Shankara as my philosophy of life and science. By:-Queen Fredricka of Greece For me the most important thing is to spread the Hindu knowledge about the soul. This is more important than any other knowledge and is my main priority. By:-Alfred B. Ford When we read in the valuable production of those great Oriental scholars...those of a Jones, a Wilkings, a Colebrooke, or a Halhed, By:- we uniformly discover in the Hindus a nation, whose polished manners are the result of a mild disposition and an extensive benevolence. By:-Alexander Hamilton I believe the Gita to be one of the major religious documents of the world. If its teachings did not seem to me to agree with those of the other gospels and scriptures, then my own system of values would be thrown into confusion, and I should feel completely bewildered. The Gita is not simply a sermon, but a philosophical treatise. By:-Christopher W. B. Isherwood, The Hindu mind has a vision of eternity and infinity. It is aware of the vast cycles of creation and destruction that govern the many universes and innumerable creatures within them. By:-David Frawley After gradual research; I have come to the conclusion that long before all heavenly books, God had revealed to the Hindus, through the Rishis of yore, of whom Brahma was the Chief, His four books of knowledge, the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda. The Quran itself made veiled references to the Upanishads as the first heavenly book and the fountainhead of the ocean of monotheism. By:-Muhammad Dara Shikoh She has left indelible imprints on one fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has the right to reclaim in universal history the rank that ignorance has refused her for a long time and to hold her place amongst the great nations summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity. By:-Sylvain Levi India indeed has a preciousness which a materialistic age is in danger of missing. Some day the fragrance of her thought will win the hearts of men. This grim chase after our own tails which marks the present age cannot continue for ever. The future contains a new human urge towards the real beauty and holiness of life. When it comes Hinduism will be searched by loving eyes and defended by knightly hands. By:-W. J. Grant India is the only country which has known God and if anyone wants to know God he must know India. By:-Vecente Avelino I owed a magnificent day to the BhagavadBy:-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. By:-Ralph Waldo Emerson he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed. By:-Count Maurice Maeterlinck In my own spiritual journey, I became a swami on the Hindu path of Bhakti. In the Hindu tradition, a swami is a monk who forgoes regular family life for the purpose of making the whole world his family and channels his full energy into spiritual practice, devotion to God and service to humanity. By:- Radhanath Swami 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 seem puny and trivial. By:-Henry David Thoreau Hinduism is a relentless pursuit of Truth. "Truth is God" and if today it has become moribund, inactive, irresponsive to growth, it is because we are fatigued; and as soon as the fatigue is over, Hinduism will burst upon the world with a brilliance perhaps unknown before. By:- Mahatma Gandhi
"One Billion-Year-Old fossil prove life began in India: AFP Washington reports in Science Magazine that German Scientist Adolf Seilachar and Indian Scientist P.K. Bose have unearthed fossil in Churhat a town in Madhya Pradesh, India which is 1.1 billion years old and has rolled back the evolutionary clock by more than 500 million years." By:- Adolf Seilachar & P.K. Bose In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.” By:- Henry David Thoreau Hinduism is not a religion; it is just a way of life that thousands of Rishis have written about. It is such a democratic religion where everybody has the freedom to think, write or say whatever they want. We have no opposition for any other philosophy coming into us. We have no opposition for the Bible to be part of our own study. Nobody here will say, 'If you read the Bible, you will go to hell'. It is an inclusive way of looking at life, and that is what we need in the world today. We have no objection taking food from every part of the world, listening to music from every part of the world. So we need to globalize wisdom too. By:-Sri Sri Ravi Shankar 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 that the great religion known by the name of Hinduism. Make no mistake, without Hinduism, India has no future. Hinduism is the soil in to which India's roots are stuck and torn out of that she will inevitably wither as a tree torn out from its place. And if Hindus do not maintain Hinduism who shall save it? If India's own children do not cling to her faith who shall guard it. India alone can save India and India and Hinduism are one. By:-Annie Besant "India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border." By:-Hu Shih, former Ambassador of China to USA "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 seem puny and trivial." By:- Thoreau The great civilization of the Indian subcontinent, has had its roots deep in antiquity, some seven to eight thousand years ago, and its flowering in the third millennium B.C. still lives on. In contrast, when we look round the world we are surprised by the fact that the Egyptian and Mesopotamia civilizations that flourished alongside this Indic Civilization have all disappeared, leaving hardly any trace behind. Why? The Indian psyche has indeed been pondering over this great cultural phenomenon of 'livingness', and this quest. By:-B B Lal "The Vedas haunt me. In them I have found eternal compensation, unfathomable power, and unbroken peace." By:- Emerson I do not think that Christianity will ever make much progress in Asia, for what is commonly known by that name is not the teaching of Christ but a rearrangement of it made in Europe and like most European institutions practical rather than thoughtful. And as for the teaching of Christ himself, the Indian finds it excellent but not ample or satisfying. There is little in it which cannot be found in some of the many scriptures of Hinduism." By:-Sir Charles Eliot "Hinduism..gave itself no name, because it set itself no sectarian limits; it claimed no universal adhesion, asserted no sole infallible dogma, set up no single narrow path or gate of salvation; it was less a creed or cult than a continuously enlarging tradition of the God ward endeavor of the human spirit. An immense manyBy:-sided and many staged provision for a spiritual selfBy:-building and selfBy:-finding, it had some right to speak of itself by the only name it knew, the eternal religion, Santana Dharma." By:-Aurobindo I do transcendental meditation, which is, I suppose, derived from Vedic or Ayurvedic principles, which is sort of Hindu principles. By:- Russell Brand Pure Vedantic Hinduism as described in particular in the Upanishads is monist and either pandeist or panendeist - Brahman is the Universe, we (as Atman or "God-souls") are a part of Brahman and Brahman itself, parts separated from the whole to be able to appreciate the whole and ever seeking to rejoin the whole and its perfect state of being as all things. Brahman in the Upanishads is not a being that is worshipped - they make it absolutely clear that Brahman is indifferent to worship and is not the object of worship. By:- Robert G. Brown It is no secret that we in the West live in a time of spiritual crisis. Western civilization has been guided by Christianity. Now it appears that this period is drawing to a close. Both religious institutions and social structures are in disarray. A great many things that were considered basic assumptions of western thought are being challenged. The reality of the external world, the soul, the linear nature of time. By:-Stephen Cross "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made." By:-Albert Einstein There is no kind of framework within which we can find consciousness in the plural; this is simply something we construct because of the temporal plurality of individuals, but it is a false construction..The only solution to this conflict insofar as any is available to us at all lies in the ancient wisdom of the Upanishad. By:-Erwin Schrödinger
