It is always inspirational to hear a good quote. Here are 50 Iconic Quotes on India and Indians.
1-10
1. “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.”
–Mark Twain, American Author
2. “In religion, India is the only millionaire… 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.”
–Mark Twain, American Author
3. “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”
-Mark Twain, American Author
4. “Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize India with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.”
-Mark Twain, American Author
5. “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, Scientist
6. “When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous”.”
–Albert Einstein, Scientist
7. “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, and has found solutions, I should point to India.”
–Max Mueller, German scholar
8. “After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.”
-W. Heisenberg, German Physicist
9. “There has been no more revolutionary contribution than the one which the Hindus (Indians) made when they invented zero.”
–Lancelot Hogben, English Mathematician
10. “India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having tosend a single soldier across her border!”
–Hu Shih, Former Ambassador of China to US
11-20
11. “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.”
-Sir William Jones, English Scholar
12. “Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the un-acquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.”
-Will Durant-American Philosopher
13. “It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such unquestionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future.”
–Will Durant-American Philosopher
14. The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the tables of Cassine and Meyer (used in the 19-th century). The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as the discovered by Tycho Brahe – a variation unknown to the School of Alexandria and also to the Arabs who followed the calculations of the school… “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.”
-Jean Sylvain Bailly, French astronomer
15. “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, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.”
-Henry David Thoreau, American Author
16. “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.”
-Rele, Jewish writer
17. “There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds… I had been seeing the world in black & white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant Technicolor.”
-Keith Bellows, American Journalist
18. “India is not an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”
-Shashi Tharoor, Indian Author/Politician
19. “It is not only a country and something geographical, but the home and the youth of the soul, the everywhere and nowhere, the oneness of all times.”
–Herman Hesse, German poet and Novelist
20. When I was growing up, my parents told me, “Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.” I tell my daughters, “Finish your homework. People in China and India are starving for your job.”
-Thomas Friedman, Journalist
21-30
21. “Agar Firdaus bar ru-e-zamin ast, Hami ast o- hami ast o- hami ast.” Translation, “If there is heaven on earth, it is here, it is here it is here.”
-Firdausi, Persian Poet on Kashmir
22. “Indian beds are more fertile than Indian lands!”
-Anonymous
23. “India is a country were apparently everyone is in a hurry but no one is ever on time!”
-Anonymous
24. “China grows because of its government, India grows despite it.”
-Anonymous
25. “It was somewhere between the interview with the Indian entrepreneur who wanted to do my taxes from Bangalore and the one who wanted to write my software from Bangalore, and the one who wanted to read my x-rays from Bangalore, and the one who wanted to trace my lost luggage from Bangalore…I was realizing that, while I had been sleeping, while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, I had missed something really fundamental in this globalization story. I had lost the thread, and I found it in Bangalore”
-Thomas Friedman, Journalist
26. “If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr, American Activist
27. “In my life, I have always looked to Mahatma Gandhi as an inspiration, because he embodies the kind of transformational change that can be made when ordinary people come together to do extraordinary things.”
-Barack Obama, American President
28. “I noted that people are happy here in India. When I went back home, people had everything in the materialistic sense and were surrounded with abundance, but they were not happy.”
-Goldie Hawn, American Actress
29. “Indian is a country where every religion finds home.”
-Annie Besant, British Activist
30. “I will lay my bones by the Ganges that India might know there is one who cares.”
-Alexander Duff, Christian Missionary to India
31-40
31. “I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift homeward on a river of bicycles, brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living.”
-James Cameroon, American Filmmaker
32. “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.”
-Apollonius Tyanaeus, Ancient Greek Philosopher
33. “No Indian ever went outside his own country on a warlike expedition, so righteous were they.”
-Arrian, Ancient Roman Historian
34. “India is the guru of the nations, the physician of the human soul in its profounder maladies; she is destined once more to remould the life of the world and restore the peace of the human spirit. But Swaraj is the necessary condition of her work and before she can do the work , she must fulfil the condition.”
-Sri Aurobindo, Bengali Poet
35. “The India I Love, does not make the headlines, but I find it wherever I go – in field or forest, town or village, mountain or desert – and in the hearts and minds of people who have given me love and affection for the better part of my lifetime.”
-Ruskin Bond, Indian Author of British descent
36. “The Portuguese, Dutch and English have been for a long time year after year, shipping home the treasures of India in their big vessels. We Germans have been all along been left to watch it. Germany would do likewise, but hers would be treasures of spiritual knowledge.”
-Heinrich Heine, German Poet
37. “With one foot grounded in time-honored traditions and the other fervently striding into the entrepreneurial e-age, India embraces diversity passionately as few other countries on earth could.”
-Lonely Planet (Travel Guide Book)
38. “It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India, that it is to the banks of the Ganges and the Indus that our hearts feel drawn as by some hidden urge.”
-Friedrich Mejer, English Statesman
39. “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.”
-Romain Rolland, French Nobel Laureate
40. “The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator’s hand.”
-George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
41-50
41. “Hospitality is not just a word here — it’s a tradition.”
-Anibal da Costa, Writer on Goa
42. “The claim of India to the attention of the world is that she, more than any other nation since history began, has devoted herself to contemplating the ultimate mysteries of existence and, in my eyes, the fact that Indian thought diverges widely from our own popular thought is a positive merit.”
–Charles Eliot, British Naval Offier
43. “You are fortunate to inherit such knowledge. I envy you. While Greece is the country of my birth, India is the country of my soul.”
-Queen Fredricka of Greece, wife of King Paul
44. “Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is the music inside the body and music is the food inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every man a poet, a princess of peasant girl if only for second eyes of man and woman meets.”
-Gregory David Roberts, Australian Author
45. “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!”
-Sylvia Levi
46. “Be as intellectual as you like about it, but India is brilliantly mad. And if you want to love it, you have to hate it first.”
-Simon Dring, Journalist
47. “India – a land where the last thing one needs to bother with is looking good. In India – at least in the circles I moved in – it’s natural to look beautiful by the smile in your heart and the way you move through the world.”
-Erin Reese, Globetrotter
48. “India will reveal to you the places in your heart that must be purified.”
–Erin Reese, Globetrotter
49. God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west… keeping the world in chains. If our nation took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.
-Mahatma Gandhi
50. A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.
-Mahatma Gandhi
