Quotes About India's Scientific & Cultural Heritage

"We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."

"India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great-grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only."

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great 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."

"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."

"India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border."

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

"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."

"After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense."

"Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries."

"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."

"The study of Sanskrit literature opens a greater field than any other for the investigation of the antiquity of human intellect."

"In the history of the world, the Indian nation is the only people, who, though fully equipped with the knowledge of arms, and in spite of being frequently invaded, have rarely taken the initiative in carrying war into enemy territory."

"India is the One Land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined."

"The Hindu civilization is so sophisticated and philosophically so profound that it awakens a natural interest in anyone inclined to study philosophy and religion."

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either."

"From the Brahmins I learned much, above all, that we are to see the Divine in everything and everyone."

"The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the Creator's hand."

"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 self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in history, the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way."

"The mathematics that we study today was developed in India, and then transmitted to the West through the Arabs."

"Indian mathematics stands out as one of the pinnacles of human achievement."

"The conception of Indian culture that has been created by European scholarship is an inadequate one in several respects."

"If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, I should point to India."

"Our present knowledge of the nervous system fits in so accurately with the internal description of the human body given in the Vedas (5000 years ago). Then the question arises whether the Vedas are really religious books or books on anatomy of the nervous system and medicine."

"It is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang."

"In the great books of India, 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 questions that exercise us."

"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."

"There has been no more revolutionary contribution than the one which the Hindus made when they invented ZERO."

"An examination of Indian Vedic doctrines shows that it is in tune with the most advanced scientific and philosophical thought of the West."

"She (India) 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 her place amongst the great nations summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity. From Persia to the Chinese sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to Islands of Java and Borneo, India has propagated her beliefs, her tales, and her civilization!"

"Where can we look for sages like those whose systems of philosophy were prototypes of those of Greece: to whose works Plato, Thales, and Pythagoras were disciples? Where do I find astronomers whose knowledge of planetary systems yet excites wonder in Europe as well as the architects and sculptors whose works claim our admiration, and the musicians who could make the mind oscillate from joy to sorrow, from tears to smile with the change of modes and varied intonation?"

"It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system."