India Quotes

We have collected and put the best India quotes in many categories. Enjoy reading these insights and feel free to share this page on your social media to inspire others.

India also called the Republic of India, is a country in Asia. It is the second most populated country in the world and 7th largest by land area.

See also: Indian Culture, Indian Literature, and Indian Proverbs

India …

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

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

India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire. – Mark Twain

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them. – William Dalrymple

India has an unbroken tradition of nonviolence from times immemorial. – Mahatma Gandhi

India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made. – Shashi Tharoor

India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age. – Jawaharlal Nehru

India has left a deeper mark upon the history the philosophy and the religion of mankind than any other terrestrial unit in the universe. – George Curzon

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 the Islands of Java and Borneo, India has propagated her beliefs, her tales, and her civilization! – Sylvia Levi

India has many customs and rituals that may seem bizarre to anyone not used to its distinctive culture. It is a strange combination of being a young nation as well as an ancient country. – Hanadi Falki

India has no dearth of brave young men and women and if they get the opportunity and help then we can compete with other nations in space exploration and one of them will fulfil her dreams. – Atal Bihari Vajpayee

India has the most technically ambitious and innovative nuclear energy program in the world. – Siegfried Hecker

India has to be transformed into a developed nation, a prosperous nation and a healthy nation, with a value system. – Abdul Kalam

India has two million gods and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire. – Mark Twain

India has worked not because of ‘unity in diversity’, the presence of a locus of identity beneath differences, as the state is fond of telling us. We have flourished rather because we are ‘diverse in our unities’, each able to imagine the connection with others in his/ her own way. – Pratap Bhanu Mehta

India is a country divided by many local languages and united by a single foreign language. – Unknown

India is a country for all but not a country for sale. Greedy politicians and greedy businessmen should aware of it. – Dr. Sivakumar Gowder

India is a country in which every great religion finds a home. – Annie Besant

India is a country where people first become engineers and then figure out what they want to become. – Unknown

India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country. – Anita Desai

India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator. – Winston Churchill

India is a global power and an important partner with whom we are building an intense, broad and enduring relationship. – Pierre Pettigrew

India is a great paradox. It is a strange combination of outstanding achievements as well as grave failures. – Neera Chandhoke & Praveen Priyadarshi

India is a hydra-headed monster (or a many splendoured thing, depending on the beholder’s point of view), and often begs the question: which India and whose India are we talking about? – Rajesh Shukla

India is a longing, a thirst to attain truth — the truth that resides in every heartbeat of ours, the truth that is lying asleep under the layer of our consciousness, the truth that is ours but yet forgotten. Its remembrance, its reclamation, is India. – Osho

India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, under used. – Lee Kuan Yew

India is a place where color is doubly bright. Pinks that scald your eyes, blues you could drown in. – Kiran Millwood Hargrave

India is a very young country. – Unknown

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart. – Simon Beaufoy

India is India because of Sanathana Dharma; it has enabled her to survive many a feasible storm; it has kept the country culturally united, infinite of varieties of language and food habits and dress. – Sri Sathya Sai Baba

India is like a bride which has two beautiful and lustrous eyes–Hindu and Mussalman. If they quarrel against each other, the beautiful bride will become ugly and one destroys the other, she will lose one eye. – Khan

India is like a living tree. It has shed many old barks and put on new barks age after age, but the Indian tree is eternal. – Swami Ranganathananda

India is like a salad bowl. Every individual ingredient in a salad can be identified; it does not lose its identity by being in the salad. Yet the salad constitutes a single preparation because there is an organizing principle. – Ashis Nundy

India is not a country, but a home. – Khalid Masood

India is not a nation, nor a country. It is a subcontinent of nationalities. – Muhammad Ali Jinnah

India is not in Tamil Nadu but Tamil Nadu is in India, the untold story of diversity in unity. – P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

India is not, as people keep calling it, 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

India is riven by the same diversity that unites it. – Bharath

India is still medieval. – Abhijit Naskar

India is the accumulated treasure of spiritual truths discovered by the Rishis. – Adi Sankaracharya

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most constructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only. – Mark Twain

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. – Sri Aurobindo

India is the land where the techniques of nonviolent social change were developed that my people have used in Montgomery, Alabama and elsewhere throughout the American South. – Martin Luther King

India is the meeting-place of the religions and among these Hinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex thing, not so much a religion as a great diversified and yet subtly unified mass of spiritual thought, realization and aspiration. – Sri Aurobindo

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 all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. – Mark Twain

India is the only country wherein the total number of engineers exceeds the number of vehicles on the road. – Nipun Varma

India is the second biggest defense procurer in the world after the U.S. – Baba Kalyani

India is the world’s most youthful nation. A nation with such youth power cannot dream small. We cannot commit this crime. We should dream big, we should enable the youth to dream big and we should give them an opportunity to realize their dreams. – Narendra Modi

India is truly a mystery containing all that is the worthiest, most spiritual, and intellectual in humankind and the worst aspects of humankind one could ever hope to find including total lack of concern for others, extreme material poverty, and spiritual bankruptcy and fraud. India is the world in other words with everything in the world revealed both of the highest form and lowest denominator. – Fred Alan Wolf

India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal. – E. M. Forster

India lives in several centuries at the same time. – Arundhati Roy

India must recognize that certain standards of taste, thought and sentiment are necessary to union, and should devise and carry out a comprehensive scheme of “Indianization”, with a view of creating a new type of Indian citizenship and building up an efficient, unified Indian nation. – M. Visvesvaraya

India needs a progressive leader to represent her locally as well as internationally. She needs a dignified, vociferous statesman, to represent her, talk for her, talk about her, talk to her, and bring the best out of her. I support a progressive, hate-free government for the future of my country. Every human deserves due respect and honour for being all that he or she is, however it cannot be denied an ounce of learning (with all humility) certainly aids in building a strong nation in every aspect. For eons India is known for her ideals, her diversity, and that she cherishes freedom and equality. Now anyone who she calls her leader cannot be allowed to puncture the constitutional fabric and infringe on the privileges she has enjoyed for years, especially after independence. Fellow citizens need to rise from sleep, that apathetic stupor, to the realization of the danger that she was plunged into in the recent past, and the imminent danger posed to the constitutional fabric, the economy of India, and the image of India. India needs to rise above the constant bickering within her walls, as the wise saying goes, a house divided within herself cannot stand. The torch of peace that we light within our walls will help us glow and light the world. Awaiting results. – Henrietta Newton Martin

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. – Sri Aurobindo

India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. … India matters to me and I would like to matter to India. – Shashi Tharoor

India teaches me again and again, that the categories into which I try to divide things don’t hold up. – Dena Moes

India then being four-sided in the plan, the side which looks to the Orient and that to the South, the Great Sea compasseth; that towards the Arctic is divided by the mountain chain of Hmdus from Scythia, inhabited by that tribe of Scythians who are called Sakai; and on the fourth side, turned towards the West, the Indus marks the boundary, the biggest or nearly so of all rivers after the Nile. – Megasthenes

India was and to some extent, still is, a nation where its citizens care more about their religious freedom than any other earthly possession. Give them food or not, it doesn’t matter to them, as long as they are allowed to practice their religion. But, take away their religion, they will fight till the last breath of their life. – Abhijit Naskar

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. – Lin Yutang

India was the motherland of our race and Sanksrit the mother of Europe’s languages. India was the mother our philosophy, of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in Christianity..of self-government and democracy. In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all. – Will Durant

India will reveal to you the places in your heart that must be purified. – Erin Reese

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings. – Will Durant

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

India – The land of Vedas, the remarkable works contain not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all were known to the seers who founded the Vedas. – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

India, it’s the center of the world. A land of intense contrasts, and if it wasn’t for Kingfisher beer and chicken bacon we felt we could live there forever. – Karl Wiggins

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody’s wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone’s life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination. – Thrity Umrigar

India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world. – Leo Tolstoy

‘If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from fun, trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from vacation.’ When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working. – Scaachi Koul

‘Karo Ya Maro,’ (Do or Die). – Mahatma Gandhi

‘This is indeed India!’…. The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour 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 hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for the alien prince and alien peasant, 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 the shows of all the rest of the world combined. – Mark Twain

A country as such does not be good or bad, only the people are good or bad, that too change by generations and this scenario is same to any nations. what India really have is a rich legacy.. nothing else – Rajesh Nanoo

A country’s greatness lies in its undying ideals of love and sacrifice that inspire the mothers of the race. – Sarojini Naidu

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. – Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru

A plane is always safe on the ground, but it is not made for that. Always take some meaningful risks in life to achieve great heights. – Chandrasekhar Azad

A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end. – Bhagat Singh

A war based on Satyagraha is always of two kinds. One is the war we wage against injustice and the other we fight against our own weaknesses. – Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

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

All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz – ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet – towards the house of God in Mecca. – Vikram Seth

All the descriptions of the parts of India visited by the Greeks give the idea of a country teeming with population and enjoying the highest degree of prosperity – 1500 cities between Hydaspes and Hyphasis. – Mountstuart Elphinstone

Amma and I went to each house to tell them we were leaving. They all said, ‘Don’t forget us. Keep visiting.’ At the age I was then, this seemed absurd. I had grown up among them – how was it even possible to forget these people? Now I see what they meant. – Vivek Shanbhag

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest. – Mahatma Gandhi

And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life… again I should point to India. – Max Muller

Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster. – Muhammad Ali Jinnah

As for us Indians we have our own problem before us. It is the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely one country made into many. – Rabindranath Tagore

At its starting point in India, the birthplace of races and religions, the womb of the world. – Jules Michelet

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. – Jawaharlal Nehru

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. – Jawaharlal Nehru

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

Before enlightenment, cornflakes, and coffee. After enlightenment, cornflakes, and coffee. – Dena Moes

Being one in a million in India means that there are 1241 Indians just like you. – Unknown

Bombay, you will be told, is the only City India has, in the sense that the world city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras, and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea, it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted, and many parts of it stink. – Khushwant Singh

Bombs and pistols do not make a revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting stone of ideas. – Bhagat Singh

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India. – Annie Besant

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else. – E.M. Forster

Calcutta’s the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat. – Tahir Shah

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a culture shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work. – Steve Jobs

Democracy is about the dialogue; protest is about initiating the dialogue and freedom of speech is about respecting each other’s dialogue. – Ankit Mishra

Don’t see others doing better than you, beat your own records every day because success is a fight between you and yourself. – Chandrasekhar Azad

Don’t take rest after your first victory because if you fail in second, more lips are waiting to say that your first victory was just luck. – A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Don’t we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? – Elizabeth Gilbert

Dushman ki goliyon ka hum samna karenge, Azad hee rahein hain, Azad hee rahenge,” (We fill face the bullets of the enemy, we have been free and will always be free). – Chandrashekhar Azad

Either I will come back after hoisting the Tricolor, or I will come back wrapped in it, but I will be back for sure. – Vikram Batra

Europe is merely powerful; India is beautiful. – Savitri Devi

Even as I took a long, hard look at some of the obvious downsides (Q: ‘What are the three things keeping India down? A: Corruption, corruption, and corruption.’), I still felt the upsides (Q: ‘What is so fantastic about the India story? A: People, people, and people.’) tilted the scales in our favor. – Shobhaa De

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood… will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic. – Indira Gandhi

Even in the smallest villages, rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and sweetmeats, dry and liquid, can be procured in abundance… – Jean-Baptiste Tavernier

Everything is recycled in India, even dreams. – Shashi Tharoor

Everything is recycled in India, even life. – Khalid Masood

Everywhere we walked we got plenty of attention due to the camera and sound men. The locals love to get on camera. I’d seen footage of Gandhi surrounded like this and always thought it was because he was very popular, but now I wonder if it was just because he had a camera crew with him. – Karl Pilkington

Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible. – James Watkins

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Mahatma Gandhi

For India is a Civilization predicated upon faith, built on belief. It has flourished on philosophy, and its most adept devotees can climb from the deepest troughs of despair to the highest peaks of pleasure with dispassion and equanimity achieved by their command of its oldest religious philosophy, Yoga. – Stanley A. Wolpert

Freedom is not given, it is taken. – Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. – Mahatma Gandhi

From Rajmahal to the sea, is an endless number of canals, cut in bygone ages from the Ganges by immense labour for navigation and irrigation. – Francois Bernier

From time immemorial India has been the mine of precious ideas to human society; giving birth to high ideas herself, she has freely distributed them broadcast over the whole world. – Swami Vivekananda

Gravitation was known to the Hindus (Indians) before the birth of Newton. The system of blood circulation was discovered by them centuries before Harvey was heard of. – P. Johnstone

Green herbs – mint and coriander – sniff, sniff! I’m hungry for chutney. – Meera Sriram

His youth carried his words and lit the room with optimism. “India is like our home,” he said, “our spiritual home. Even before we get here there was that feeling.” – Richard Payment

History Depicts the Events Happened; the way we Perceive makes the difference. – Aniket S Sharma

History itself bears testimony to the fact. All the soul-elevating ideas and the different branches of knowledge that exist in the world are found on proper investigation to have their roots in India. – Swami Vivekananda

History was alive and entangled in the everyday stories of India, and it needed to be coaxed onto the pages of a book. In that sense, history was a woman, substantial, vigorous, complex and always given the customary short shrift. – Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal. – E.M. Forster

I actually got really interested in travelling to India after studying yoga. I have this wanderlust and don’t like doing things without knowing about the history. – Eden Sher

I am an Indian and we celebrate all festivals in every region of every religion. That is why it is called Incredible India! – Vinayak Muraleedharan

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity. – Voltaire

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, – astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc… It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges 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. – Voltaire

I am pain-stricken to say, since the moment I was born, I have found nothing extraordinary in this ancient land of greatness to be exceptionally proud of. I am not a proud Indian. India in its present condition has given me no reason to feel proud. However, I do feel proud of the ancient Indians, just like I feel proud of the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, and so on. Scientists are beyond borders, just like the ancient scientists of India, whom you prefer to call sages. – Abhijit Naskar

I believe in a religion that propagates freedom, equality and brotherhood. – Chandrasekhar Azad

I believe that the civilization India evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors, Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernized; of China, nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation. – Mahatma Gandhi

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. – Shashi Tharoor

I do not want India to be an economic superpower. I want India to be a happy country. – J.R.D. Tata

I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture, or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian last, and nothing else but Indians. – Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

I don’t want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place. – Bill Bryson

I felt the kind of peace you feel when you come in from a hot afternoon and pour cold water over your feet. – Sachin Kundalkar

I have a vision of a Modern India. I have embarked on a huge mission to convert that vision into reality. My mantra is Development. – Narendra Modi

I know Only One Culture that is India. – Khalid Masood

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 Cameron

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. – John Archibald Wheeler

I listen to the sound of India’s voices for the last time. Laughter ripples like water. Prayer is a single note held long. There is so much life here. And too much death. I feel a soft breeze caress my face and I look up. An orange ribbon is floating through the air. In India, it’s easy to see the wind. – Cathy Ostlere

I love Indian food – it’s my favourite cuisine. I love the mixture of spices and the subtle flavours. It’s really erotic; the spices are so sensuous. – Joe Perry

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

I probably did too much thinking in India. I blame it on the roads, for they were superb. – Robert Edison Fulton Jr

I remember flying with Air India to New York quite a few years ago now and I love Indian food, so the fact that I had a curry on board was fantastic. – Phil Collins

I think there is a real misconception about Indian food being super spicy. And I know that’s because when you go into an Indian restaurant, it is pretty spicy. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, my husband can’t handle a lot of heat. I’ve had to temper my cooking so that he can eat with me. – Aarti Sequeira

I want all people to be Indians first, Indian last, and nothing else but Indians. – Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realize my good fortune and would never again forget it. – Tahir Shah

If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali–a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. – Shashi Tharoor

If God had so wished, he would have made all Indians speak with one language … the unity of India has been and shall always be a unity in diversity. – Rabindranath Tagore

If I had never done anything else in India, I would have written my name here, and the letters would have been a living joy. – Lord Curzon

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 Muller

If I would be given a chance to rewrite the dictionary, I would flip through the pages so quickly and would replace India with, the land where beauty is redefined in itself, kindness has been touched, warmth has been spread and emotions have been felt. – Magith Noohukhan

If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum. – Shashi Tharoor

If India is not secular, then India is not India at all. – Atal Bihari Vajpayee

If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from “fun,” trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from “vacation.” When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working. – Scaachi Koul

If the foundation is firm the building can withstand calamities. The practice of yoga is the foundation so that the self is not shaken under any circumstances. – B.K.S. Iyengar

If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947. – Mike Davis

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One… I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds. – The Bhagavad Gita

If there is any land on this earth that can lay claim to be the blessed Punya Bhumi, to be the land to which all souls on this earth must come to account for Karma, the land to which every soul that is wending its way Godward must come to attain its last home, the land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards generosity, towards purity, towards calmness, above all, the land of introspection and of spirituality – it is India. – Swami Vivekananda

If there is one place on the face of the 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. For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. – Romain Rolland

If you can control the rising of the mind into ripples, you will experience Yoga. – Patanjali

Ignorance is always afraid of change. – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

Imagine a king without a crown. Imagine India without Kashmir. – Vinita Kinra

In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it. – Tahir Shah

In India even the most mundane inquiries have a habit of ending this way. There may be two answers, there may be five, a dozen or a hundred; the only thing that is certain is that all will be different. – Eric Newby

In India God is full of gods. – Khalid Masood

In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood. – Shashi Tharoor

In India, everything has a use and a value. – Tahir Shah

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

In India, it is a religion that forms the very core of the national heart. It is the backbone – the bed-rock – the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built. The traditional Indian mind has been for centuries, and still is, first religious, and then everything else. – Abhijit Naskar

In India, it is believed that all creatures have a purpose. – Mel Gibson

In India, success is relative. More success, more relatives. – व. पु. काळे [V.P.Kale], Ka Re Bhullasi

In India, there is not just forward motion on roads, there is backward, harmonic, oscillatory, curvilinear, perpendicular and projectile motion as well. – Unknown

In India, they don’t worship God, they worship politicians, religious leaders and film actors as God. – P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

In India, we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood. – Shashi Tharoor

In India, we first populate cities for 20 years. Then plan them for another 20 years. – Unknown

In India, you don’t drive on the left of the road, you drive on what is left on the road. – Unknown

In India, you’re taught that there are certain qualities that make you a divine human being. – Deepak Chopra

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

In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough. – Tahir Shah

In the countryside, he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins. – Don DeLillo

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. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the life of the Indian there is only one inevitable duty-the duty of prayer-the daily recognition of the Unseen and Eternal. Our daily devotions were more necessary to us than daily food. – Charles Alexander Eastman

In the west, we think of yoga as an exercise programme, when actually where it’s from in India it’s a whole philosophy. The Asanas and the exercise programme are one tiny aspect of it, and so it really, really fascinates me. – Jayne Middlemiss

In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously. – Jerry Pinto

Indian cinema gives you everything that western cinema doesn’t. It’s masaledar and spicy. If you like Indian food, I think you’ll love Indian movies. – Shahid Kapoor

Indian democracy has taught the world the beauty and competitiveness of its governing system for a prolonged period. But Modi administration is remapping the Indian political map which some called the rise of nationalism, while others called it the rise of patriotism in this era of populism. – Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Indian food is like classical music raga- it takes time to build up to a crescendo. – Shobhaa De

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

India’s political economy is replete with tales of how things did not happen. The lament is preceded by the ubiquitous ‘if only’, about how solutions were thought of but the ideas did not translate into action. – Shankkar Aiyar

India’s way is not Europe’s. India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages. – Mahatma Gandhi

India’s youth power, the skills and will power of this young generation will help give the country a new identity in the world. – Srinivas Mishra

Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. – Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

International Yoga Day is a reflection of the largest knowledge-based peoples’ movement the world has ever seen. – Narendra Modi

It is already becoming clearer that a chapter which has a western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race… At this supremely dangerous moment in history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way. – Dr. Arnold Toynbee

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol 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. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. – Pierre-Simon Laplace

It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organization that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history. – Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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. – Will Durant

IT+IT=IT; Indian talent + Information technology = India Tomorrow. – Narendra Modi

Jaipur is a blushing bride draped in pink, dancing in our dreams while the peacocks sing. – Vinita Kinra

Kerala’s food evolved from the diverse people who traversed this land. The story of Kerala is closely linked to the story of the world’s eagerness for spices. Because of the wealth this land possessed, people of various countries, religions, and races arrived, for trade. Flourishing commerce translated into an enthusiastic reception for those who could conduct business competently. Which, in turn, opened up avenues for new religions and communities. Eventually, colonization spelt an end to the hospitality, but it also gave rise to the strong ethos of Malayali-ness that now marks this land. – Theresa Varghese

Khoon se khelenge Holi gar Vatan mushkil main hai” (we will play Holi without blood if our country is in difficulty). – Ashfaqullah Khan

Life is all about a card game. Choosing the right cards is not in our hand. But playing well with the cards in hand determines our success. – Bal Gangadhar Tilak

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. – Jawaharlal Nehru

Life loses half its interest if there is no struggle — if there are no risks to be taken. – Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

Life should be great rather than long. – B.R. Ambedkar

Like India herself, I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket. I move to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress. – Shashi Tharoor

Living in a small town [in India] was like living in a glass house! – Mallika Nawal

Long Live India, Long Live the Indians and Long Live the Republic. – J. Ruby

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. – Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru

Many of the advances in the sciences that we consider today to have been made in Europe were in fact made in India centuries ago. – Grant Duff

Marriage: In India a fact. In other parts of the world an obsession. – Khalid Masood

Men, money and material cannot by themselves bring victory or freedom. We must have the motive-power that will inspire us to brave deeds and heroic exploits. – Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking. – Bhagat Singh

Millions of precious gems, millions of gold coins, millions of miles of fertile country, millions of amazing people. – Marco Polo

More dreams are realized and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India. – Gregory David Roberts

My own life in India, since I came to it in 1893 to make it my home, has been devoted to one purpose, to give back to India her ancient freedom. – Annie Besant

Never lose your faith in the destiny of India. There is no power on Earth that can keep India in bondage. India will be free, that too, soon. – Subhash Chandra Bose

On my first trip to India, my guru took me to an ashram in Allahabad. I felt like I was walking into a place I had been before. It felt like it was my spiritual home. – Trevor Hall

On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator’s hand. – George Bernard Shaw

One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives. – Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization. – Mahatma Gandhi

Our federal Constitution embodies the idea of modern India: it defines not only India but also modernity. – Pranab Mukherjee

Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India. – Mark Twain

Our population of 121 crores is not a limitation – it is the reason we will grow. – Sukant Ratnakar

Partition of India was a portal. – Khalid Masood

Patriotism means to stand by the people, not to stand by the party. – Sumit Agarwal

People allow India to exist only in two versions: In the first, everything is too beautiful to be encapsulated, women are swarthy and hippy, shoeless boys play soccer in dirt roads, elephants roam the streets, and temples are merely there for your enjoyment. In the second, India is a country lurching forward awkwardly, suffering a rape epidemic, incapable of a feminist movement or proper health care, a place where people s*** and p*** in the streets, where the caste system has ruined entire generations, where poverty is so rampant and depressing that you’ll hardly make it out with your soul intact, where your IT center is based, a place just close enough to Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan to be scary, but stable enough to be fun and exotic. Because, boy, isn’t the food good, and aren’t the landmarks something, and hasn’t everyone there figured out a kind of profound meditative inner peace that we should all learn from? Like all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. A place, any place, can be beautiful and perfect and damaged and dangerous at the same time. – Scaachi Koul

Rains are an act of God in India. And God, as we know, is a law unto himself. He is not responsible, neither is He accountable. That is the essence of God: He gives with two hands and takes away with eight more. Why else would Indian gods and goddesses have several pairs of hands? – Kiran Nagarkar

religions and races arrived, for trade. Flourishing commerce translated into an enthusiastic reception for those who could conduct business competently. Which, in turn, opened up avenues for new religions and communities. Eventually, colonization spelt an end to the hospitality, but it also gave rise to the strong ethos of Malayali-ness that now marks this land. – Theresa Varghese

Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birthright of all. – Bhagat Singh

Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara(India is the best in the world). – Muhammad Iqbal

Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai, dekhna hai zor kitna baazu-e-qaatil me hai” (The desire to sacrifice onself is in the heart, it has to be seen how much strength the enemy has). – Ramprasad Bismil

She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. – Jawaharlal Nehru

Since the early beginning of history, India has been the Klondyke of the world. – Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

So all you desi boys and girls, dark skin or not, you are beautiful just the way you are. No need to change your skin to be fair and white. And no need to adapt to one’s culture to fit in. If you feel uncomfortable doing what other people are doing, then don’t do it! – Simi Sunny

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

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God. – Salman Rushdie

Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite is native to it. India saw from the beginning — and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight — that life cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities. – Sri Aurobindo

The best thing about India is the freedom that one enjoys here, which is also the worst thing about it. – Deepak Rana

The designation of wife in India, of the Hindu wife, is higher and grander than that of Empress. She is called Devi. – Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

The emergence of India as a major global power is an idea whose time has come. This is a legitimate ambition for China. This is a legitimate ambition for India. And the challenge for humanity is to evolve a world system in which the legitimate ambitions of both our countries can find constructive expression without threatening anybody else. – Manmohan Singh

The extraordinary thing about India is that it’s such a family place. It’s full of families everywhere. – Danny Boyle

The Ganga to me is the symbol of India’s memorable past which has been flowing into the present and continues to flow towards the ocean of the future. – Jawaharlal Nehru

The history of India is a myriad mosaic of incidents which are woven into a large continuous carpet interesting in its contours, its variety, its colours, sometimes depressing, sometimes bright but always interesting and at the same times having a unity seldom perceived in the history of other countries or regions of the world. Unfortunately in the huge archives of written word available in India from the ancient Vedas to modern times we find everything on any topic except history. – Gyan Swarup Gupta

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

The Indian nation cannot be killed. Deathless it stands, and it will stand so long as that spirit shall remain as the background, so long as her people do not give up their spirituality. – Swami Vivekananda

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

The knowledge I have acquired about Bengal in two visits inclines me to believe that it is richer than Egypt. It exports in abundance cotton and silks, rice, sugar, butter. It produces amply for its own consumption of wheat, vegetables, grains, fowls, ducks and geese. It has immense herds of pigs and flocks of sheep and goats. Fish of every kind it has in profusion. – The French traveller, Bernier

The monsoons were the real thing; they dissolved things to the bone. – Anjum Hasan

The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. – Shashi Tharoor

The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all. – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests. – Jawaharlal Nehru

The Taj Mahal rises above the banks of the river like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time. – Rabindranath Tagore

The train system in India is chaotic and fun – it’s the best way to see the landscape. Being in with all the families and also being the odd animal is a colorful experience you’ll never forget. – Natalie Dormer

The true father of free India was Subhas Chandra Bose, not Gandhi. – Abhijit Naskar

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India, and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before. – Alfred North Whitehead

The World is my home and India is my living room. I’m independent in my living room to explore, hoping someday I will also be able to explore my own home. – Bikram Mahata

The world is the body and India is its life. – Khalid Masood

The wounds will take decades to heal, centuries to overcome the trauma. – Gulzar

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. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor. -Keith Bellows

There are three trips you take to India: the one you think you’re going to have – that you plan for; the one you actually have; and the one you live through once you go back home. – Erin Reese

There are two kinds of people in life: those who like India and those who do not. – Khalid Masood

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who have seen the Taj Mahal and love it, and those who have not seen the Taj Mahal and love it. I would like people to watch the Taj Mahal and fall in love with it. – President Bill Clinton

There has been no more revolutionary contribution than the one which the Hindus (Indians) made when they invented ZERO. – Lancelot Hogben

There is no book in the world that is so thrilling, stirring and inspiring as the Upanishads. – Max Muller

There is something unique in this soil, which despite many obstacles has always remained the abode of great souls. – Sardar Patel

There is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world. – H. G. Wells

These stories always take us to some faraway places which we can never visit in real life. – Viraj J. Mahajan

This arrogant, conceited history strides with her head in the clouds and never looks down. She does not realize how she crushes millions of people beneath her feet. The common people. She doesn’t understand that one may cut a mountain in two, but people? It’s a hard task, Bhai, to cut one person in two. They bleed.’ A deep sigh coursed through the gathering. Master Fazal said, ‘History will keep on marching like this. The names of a few people will stick to her fabric. She will register those. there was Hitler, there was Mussolini, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, among others. this time the names maybe Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah, Subhash Bose! But the names of the lakhs and crores who have lost their lives will be nowhere. They will be mere numbers in which all of us will be included! – Gulzar

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time – relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them. – Indu Sundaresan

This is indeed India!… The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour 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 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 traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, 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 the shows of all the rest of the world combined. – Mark Twain

Those who are prepared to die for any cause are seldom defeated. – Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru

Time spent in India has an extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal. – Tahir Shah

To know India and her peoples, one has to know the monsoon. one has to know the monsoon. It is not enough to read about it in books, or see it on the cinema screen, or hear someone talk about it. It has to be a personal experience because nothing short of living through it can fully convey all it means to a people for whom it is not only the source of life but also their most exciting impact with nature. – Khushwant Singh

To me, India’s always represented ‘everything’; it represents ‘all.’ Everything is here. You can stay here forever, and you’ll never feel like you’ve missed out on life. – Chris Martin

To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India, I come as a pilgrim. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

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, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it. – Alan Watts

Unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. In the world, fear has no place. Only strength respects strength. – A.P.J Abdul Kalam

Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was – it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA. – Thrity Umrigar

Waking up in India is like waking up to life itself. – Reymond Page

We celebrate Republic and Independence Days in India to remind us, that our country and its freedom is the result of sweat, patience, persistence, and sacrifice of those with the courage to dream freedom and make it a reality for their future generations. – Mohith Agadi

We have to shed mutual bickering, shed the difference of being high or low and develop the sense of equality and banish untouchability. We have to restore the conditions of Swaraj prevalent prior to British rule. We have to live like the children of the same father. – Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

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

We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action. – Sarojini Naidu

We want to invite the world to Make in India, make India as the base for manufacturing electronic goods. – Narendra Modi

We will face the bullets of the enemies; we are free and will remain free. – Chandrasekhar Azad

What India has been, the whole world is now. The whole world is becoming one country … all national histories are merely chapters in the larger one. – Rabindranath Tagore

What is harder to do is breaking the ties to the people, the places, and the version of me that will linger. – Ranjani Rao

What is now in the past was once in the future. – Ramachandra Guha

Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only. – Max Muller

When I die India will be found engraved on my heart. – Mary of Teck

When I stopped eating meat, I fell in love with East Indian food – there’s so much selection, and they use the most beautiful spices. – Laura Mennell

When I think of India, I think of many things: of broad fields doted with innumerable small villages; of towns and cities I have visited; of the magic of the rainy season which pours life into the dry, parched up land and converts it suddenly into a glistening expanse of beauty and greenery; of great rivers and flowing water; of the Southern tip of India; of people, individually and in the mass; and above all of the HImalayas, snow capped or some mountain valley in Kashmir in the spring covered with new flowers, and with a brook bubbling and gurgling through it. – Jawahar Lal Nehru

When I venture out to eat, I like to go to places with food that I don’t know how to make. So my favorites are Japanese and Indian. Indian food has so much layering of flavor, and the dishes go together so harmoniously. – Gwyneth Paltrow

When the land of snake charmers begins charming the world, the credit goes to its People, its Youth. – Vivek Narayan Sharma

When the real history of India will be unearthed, it will be proved that, as in matters of religion, so in fine arts, India is the primal Guru of the whole world. – Swami Vivekananda

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East–above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe–we discover there many a truth, 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. – Victor Cousin

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

Where are the coconut trees bowing allegiance to the wind, the wide-open spaces, the verdant green fields? – Renita D’Silva

Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India’s golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else. – Tahir ShahIndia is a place where color is doubly bright. Pinks that scald your eyes, blues you could drown in. – Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action-Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake. – Rabindranath Tagore

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow. – Anita Desai

With me and India it’s all about leaving and returning. Madras is home. It’s a very complicated relationship. When you are away too long you get homesick, and when you are there too long you are sick of home. – Tishani Doshi

Yoga allows you to rediscover a sense of wholeness in your life, where you do not feel like you are constantly trying to fit broken pieces together. – B.K.S. Iyengar

Yoga is a way to freedom. By its constant practise, we can free ourselves from fear, anguish and loneliness. – Indra Devi

Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life. – B.K.S. Iyengar

Yoga is possible for anybody who really wants it. Yoga is universal…. But don’t approach yoga with a business mind looking for worldly gain. – K. Pattabhi Jois

Yoga takes you into the present moment, the only place where life exists. – Patanjali

You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian. – Amit Kalantri

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi

Young men and women are to build up a strong character. A nation’s greatness was reflected in the character of her people. If it was sullied by selfishness, such a people could not prosper or achieve great things. Selfishness had its place in life as everyone had to look to his own needs and that of his family, but it could not be made the be – all and end – all of life. – Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

[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 all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. – Mark Twain

‎No people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time. – Salman Rushdie

Indian Proverbs

A person who misses a chance and the monkey who misses its branch can’t be saved. – Indian Proverb

A thief thinks everybody steals. – Indian Proverb

All ten fingers are used in eating. But it is the thumb that has to push the food into the mouth. – Indian Proverb

Blaming your faults on your nature does not change the nature of your faults. – Indian Proverb

Certain things capture the eye but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Indian Proverb

Do not dig a well only after the house catches fire. – Indian Proverb

Don’t judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins. – Indian Proverb

Don’t poison someone whom you can kill with sweets. – Indian Proverb

Elders’ advice is like gooseberries; at first sour then sweet. – Indian Proverb

Great anger is more destructive than the sword. – Indian Proverb

He who does not climb, will not fall either. – Indian Proverb

I had no shoes and complained until I saw a man who had no feet. – Indian Proverb

I have lanced many boils, but none pained like my own. – Indian Proverb

If one is lazy, even nectar turns into poison. – Indian Proverb

If you live in the river, you should make friends with the crocodile. – Indian Proverb

If you live on the river, befriend the crocodile. – Indian Proverb

In a tree that you can’t climb, there are always a thousand fruits. – Indian Proverb

It is better to be blind than to see things from only one point of view. – Indian Proverb

Just as beauty spots and hair beautify women, proverbs beautify language. – Indian Proverb

Justice is better than admiration. – Indian Proverb

Knowledge is higher than power. – Indian Proverb

Life is a bridge, cross over it, but build no house on it. – Indian Proverb

Life is like a lamp flame; it needs a little oil now and then. – Indian Proverb

Life is not a continuum of pleasant choices, but of inevitable problems that call for strength, determination, and hard work. – Indian Proverb

Most adults are attentive to what someone is doing, but children see beyond that. – Indian Proverb

One can sense the fragrance of the tulsi even when the first two tender leaves appear. – Indian Proverb

One man’s house burns so that another may warm himself. – Indian Proverb

Pull someone by the ears and his head will follow. – Indian Proverb

The cloud that roars seldom pours. – Indian Proverb

The first day a guest, the second day a guest, the third day a calamity. – Indian Proverb

The neighbor’s curry is tasty even if it’s sour. – Indian Proverb

The right path is steep and upwards, the wrong path is easy and horizontal. – Indian Proverb

The thief that is not caught is a king. – Indian Proverb

The three great mysteries: air to a bird, water to a fish, mankind to himself. – Indian Proverb

The way to overcome the angry man is with gentleness, the evil man with goodness, the miser with generosity and the liar with truth. – Indian Proverb

The worth of the shade is only known when the sun is beating down hot. – Indian Proverb

There is no hand to catch time. – Indian Proverb

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. – Indian Proverb

They who dream for too long will become like their shadow. – Indian Proverb

Those who give, have all things, those who withhold have nothing. – Indian Proverb

To lift an elephant you need an elephant. – Indian Proverb

Walking slowly, even the donkey will reach Lhasa. – Indian Proverb

We are both queens, so who will hang out the laundry? – Indian Proverb

We can’t change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust the sails. – Indian Proverb

When a camel is at the foot of a mountain only then judge his height. – Indian Proverb

When an elephant is in trouble, even a frog will kick him. – Indian Proverb

When you have an ass for a friend, expect nothing but kicks. – Indian Proverb

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice. – Indian Proverb

Where the needle goes, the thread follows. – Indian Proverb

Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow but a vision. – Indian Proverb

You can often find in rivers what you cannot find in oceans. – Indian Proverb

You may look up for inspiration or look down in desperation but do not look sideways for information. – Indian Proverb

Hindu Proverbs

A hundred divine epochs would not suffice to describe all the marvels of the Himalaya. – Hindu Proverbs

Great minds discuss ideas, medium minds discuss events, and little minds discuss people. – Hindu Proverbs

Like the body that is made up of different limbs and organs, all moral creatures must depend on each other to exist. – Hindu Proverbs

To control the mind is like trying to control a drunken monkey that has been bitten by a scorpion. – Hindu Proverbs

Famous Indian Sayings

Do not apply reasoning to what is unthinkable. The mark of the unthinkable is that it is above all material causes. – Purana

Many are the names of God and infinite the forms that lead us to know Him. In whatsoever name or form you desire to call Him, in that very form and name you will see Him. – Sri Ramakrishna

The mind of a sage, even when angered, is never perturbed. Can a man heat the waters of the sea with a lighted straw? – Hitopadesha

Knowledge overcomes ignorance as sunlight darkness. – Atmabodha Prakasika

The Spirit is in contact with matter without being contaminated by it, just as the crystal permits the colour of the cloth to be seen through it without being in any way defiled by it. – Atmabodha Prakasika

As the sun is not sullied by the defects of external objects, so the inner soul of all beings is not sullied by the misery of the world. – Katha Upanishad

Amass that wealth which has nothing to fear from kings or thieves, and which does not desert thee in death. – Mahabharat

Neither mother, nor children, nor kinsmen, nor dear familiar friends follow a man in death; he departs alone. The deeds alone which he has done are his fellow-travellers. – Mahabharat

If you project all sorts of hatred and jealousy, they will rebound on you with compound interest. – Swami Vivekananda

A wicked person, though sweet speaking, is not to be trusted; honey is on his tongue, but in his heart poison. – Chanak

They concealed their anger under signs of joy, as a lake with tranquil surface hides an alligator. – Raghuvansi saying

When I watch the heavens in the silence of the night, as if the stars, in the profound silence of space, were listening to the eternal music of the Divine. – Sri Ananda Acharaya

He alone crosses the ocean of Maya who comes face to face with God, who realizes Him. He is truly free, living even in this body, who knows that God is the doer and he is the non-doer. – Sri Ramakrishna

This world is only one drop in an infinite ocean, one link in an infinite chain. – Swami Vivekananda

The soul floats like the lotus on the lake unmoved, unruffled by the tide. – Bhagavadgita

The rivers, the flowers, the moon’a phases, disappear but return, not so youth. – Katha Saritsagar

Amass that wealth which has nothing to fear from kings or thieves, and which does not desert thee in death. – Mahabharat

Having crossed the sea of Fascination, and having killed the giants, Inclination, Aversion, the wise shall, married to Peace, enjoy repose of soul. – Atmabodha

As the sun is not sullied by the defects of external objects, so the inner soul of all beings is not sullied by the misery of the world. – Katha Upanishad

As people abandon old and threadbare clothes to put on others new; so casts the embodied soul its worn-out frame to enter other forms. – Bhagavad Gita

Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth. – Manu

What man is there whom contact with a great soul will not exalt? A drop of water upon the petal of a lotus glistens with the splendors of the pearl. – Panchatantra

Diligence, persistence, strength, perception, and courage — even God stands in awe of him that possesses these. – Vihramacharita

Though one devote himself to many teachers, he must extract the essence – as the bee from flowers. – Kapila

The possession which the Creator has written, be it small or great, we shall surely attain even in the waste desert; and more than this we can never get, though we be on Mount Meru, whose sides are packed with gold. Therefore, be of good cheer, and spend not your life with worry. Behold in the fountain, alike as in the ocean, you shall dip your pitcher full of water. – Bhartrihari

A work prospers through endeavors, not through vows. – Hitopadesa

As the light goes out with the exhaustion of the oil, so fortune fails with the cessation of human endeavor. – Mahabharata

Constantly a man should reflect and ask himself, “What good thing have I done this day? The setting sun will carry with it a portion of my life.” – Sarngadhara Paddhati

He whose days pass without imparting and enjoying breathes indeed, but he does not live. – Hitopadesa

Ravana, who seeking to burn the tail of Hanuman and kindled a fire upon it, lived to see his own city burned down in consequence. – Kuvalajananda

The base person sees in others, whatever the excellences, only the defects and faults. A swine notices only the mud and mire in the pond that bears the lotus. – Kavitamrtakupa

The relations of all living end in separation. They arise and they disappear, like bubbles upon the water. – Mahabharata

The wise grieve not for the departed, nor for those who yet survive.
Never was the time when I was not, nor thou; and never
Shall be the time when all of us shall be not; as the unbodied soul
In this corporeal frame moves swiftly on through boyhood, youth, and age,
So will it pass through other forms hereafter — be not grieved thereat.
The man whom pain and pleasure, heat and cold affect not, he is fit
For immortality: that which is not cannot be — and that which is
Can never cease to be. Know this — the Being that spread this universe
Is indestructible; who can destroy the Indestructible?
These bodies that enclose the everlasting soul, inscrutable,
Immortal, have an end — but he who thinks the soul can be destroyed,
And he who deems it a destroyer, are alike mistaken: it
Kills not, and is not killed; it is not born, nor doth it ever die;
It has no past nor future — unproduced, unchanging, infinite : he
Who knows it fixed, unborn, imperishable, indissoluble,
How can that man destroy another, or extinguish below?
As men abandon old and threadbare clothes to put on others new,
So casts the embodied soul its worn out frame to enter other forms.
No dart can pierce it; flame cannot consume it, water wet it not,
Nor scorching breezes dry it: indestructible, incapable
Of heat or moisture or aridity — eternal, all-pervading,
Steadfast, immoveable; perpetual, yet imperceptible,
Incomprehensible, unfading, deathless, unimaginable. – Sri Krishna, Mahabharata

He (the man discerning and at peace) beholdeth the Supreme Soul in all things, and all things in the Supreme Soul. – Bhagavat Gita

Indian Wisdom

A person who misses a chance and the monkey who misses its branch can’t be saved. – Indian Wisdom

Alertness and courage are life’s shields. – Indian Wisdom

Certain things capture the eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Indian Wisdom

Don’t bargain for fish which are still in the water. – Indian Wisdom

Great anger is more destructive than the sword. – Indian Wisdom

I had no shoes and complained until I saw a man who had no feet. – Indian Wisdom

In a tree that you can’t climb, there are always a thousand fruits. – Indian Wisdom

Life is a bridge, cross over it, but build no house on it. – Indian Wisdom

Life is not a continuum of pleasant choices, but of inevitable problems that call for strength, determination, and hard work. – Indian Wisdom

The eyes do not see what the mind does not want. – Indian Wisdom

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. – Indian Wisdom

To quarrel with a man of a good speech is better than to converse with a man who does not speak well. – Indian Wisdom

What was hard to bear is sweet to remember. – Indian Wisdom

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice. – Indian Wisdom

Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow but a vision. – Indian Wisdom

You sometimes forget the harm that was done to you, but never the harm you have done to others. – Indian Wisdom

Indian Expression

Driving be like:
UK: Drive to the left
US: Drive to the right
India: Criss Cross

Austerity is an ornament, humility is honorable. – Indian Expression

Have I told you how much you matar to me? – Indian Expression

Having a bad day? Wish you Lucknow! – Indian Expression

I feel like there should be a travel book for India called “A definitive guide to India: The Hindus and the Hindont’s”. – Indian Expression

In America, you cast your vote. In India, you vote your caste. – Indian Expression

India is my cup of chai. – Indian Expression

It ain’t over lentil it’s over! – Indian Expression

It’s always a good time for chai. – Indian Expression

Keep calm and curry on. – Indian Expression

Life’s so daal without you! – Indian Expression

The Indian spice mix in with the crowd and disappear without a trace. – Indian Expression

The three great mysteries: air to a bird, water to a fish, humankind to himself. – Indian Expression

They who give have all things; they who withhold have nothing. – Indian Expression

We can’t change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust the sails. – Indian Expression

What do you call a person who tells a lot of puns? Punjabi. – Indian Expression

What do you call a road in India? The Milky Way. – Indian Expression

What’s the condition of roads in India? Hyderabad. – Indian Expression

You ate all the curry, There’s naan left for everyone else! – Indian Expression

You’re kinda big daal. – Indian Expression

You’re second to naan. – Indian Expression

You’re such a dealing. – Indian Expression

India Quotes From Wikiquote

• 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 of Tyana, quoted in The Transition to a Global Society (1991) by Kishor Gandhi, p. 17, and in The Age of Elephants (2006) by Peter Moss, p. v

• This also is remarkable in India, that all Indians are free, and no Indian at all is a slave. In this the Indians agree with the Lacedaemonians. Yet the Lacedaemonians have Helots for slaves, who perform the duties of slaves; but the Indians have no slaves at all, much less is any Indian a slave.
  • Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, Book VII : Indica, as translated by Edgar Iliff Robson (1929), p. 335

• No Indian ever went outside his own country on a warlike expedition, so righteous were they.
  • Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, Book VII : Indica, as translated by Edgar Iliff Robson (1929), p. 18

• India of the ages is not dead nor has She spoken her last creative word; She lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not an Anglicized oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the Occident’s success and failure, but still the ancient immemorial Shakti recovering Her deepest self, lifting Her head higher toward the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.
  • Sri Aurobindo, in the last issue of Arya: A Philosophical Review (January 1921), as quoted in The Modern Review, Vol. 29 (1921), p. 626.

• For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shaktis of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people …
  • Sri Aurobindo (Bhawāni Mandir) quoted in Issues of Identity in Indian English Fiction: A Close Reading of Canonical Indian English Novels by H. S. Komalesha

• 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, Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual (1947), p. 196

• The ‘nation idea’ India never had. By that I mean the political idea of the nation. It is a modern growth. But we had in India the cultural and spiritual idea of the nation.
  • Sri Aurobindo, Indias Rebirth, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 460

• India is the only country which has known God and if anyone wants to know God he must know India.
  • Vecente Avelino, as quoted in A Tribute to Hinduism : Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture (2008), p. 196

• She who bears plants endowed with many varied powers, may Prithivī for us spread wide and favour us.
  In whom the sea, and Sindhu, and the waters, in whom our food and corn-lands had their being.
  • Excerpt from the Prithvi Sukta in the Atharva Veda 12.1-63 (trans. by Maurice Bloomfield, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 42, 1897). The Prithvi Sukta is often regarded as the first national song, e.g. C.f. Jain, M. (2010). Parallel pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim relations, 1707-1857. chapter V.

• In the tract of land known as Bhārata-varṣa, as in Ilāvṛta-varṣa, there are many mountains and rivers…. The inhabitants of Bhārata-varṣa are purified because they always remember these rivers.
  • Bhagavata Purana [1]

• The age in which true history appeared in India was one of great intellectual and spiritual ferment. Mystics and sophists of all kinds roamed through the Ganga Valley, all advocating some form of mental discipline and asceticism as a means to salvation; but the age of the Buddha, when many of the best minds were abandoning their homes and professions for a life of asceticism, was also a time of advance in commerce and politics. It produced not only philosophers and ascetics, but also merchant princes and men of action.
  • A. L. Basham in The Wonder that was India (1954)

• The ancient civilisation of India differs from those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, in that its traditions have been preserved without a break down to the present day. Until the advent of the archaeologist, the peasant of Egypt or Iraq had no knowledge of the culture of his forefathers, and it is doubtful whether his Greek counterpart had any but the vaguest ideas about the glory of Periclean Athens. In each case there had been an almost complete break with the past. On the other hand…to this day legends known to the humblest Indian recall the names of shadowy chieftains who lived nearly a thousand years before Christ, and the orthodox Brahman in his daily worship repeats hymns composed even earlier. India and China have, in fact, the oldest continuous cultural traditions in the world.
  • A.L.Basham in his “The Wonder That Was India” quoted in [2] [This article is a major extract from the article “Sita Ram Goel, memories and ideas” by S. Talageri, written for the Sita Ram Goel Commemoration Volume, entitled “India’s Only Communalist”, edited by Koenraad Elst, published in 2005.

• 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. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.
  • Keith Bellows, Vice-President, National Geographic Society, as quoted in Think India: The Rise of the World’s Next Superpower and What It Means for Every American (2007) by Vinay Rai and William L. Simon, p. 187
  • Keith Bellows, as quoted in ”Study in India – A Guide by Knowledge Must

• India is the mother of religion. In her are combined science and religion in perfect harmony, and that is the Hindu religion, and it is India that shall be again the spiritual mother of the world.
  • Annie Besant, [3] ( Besant’s lecture at the Grand Theatre, Calcutta on Jan 15th 1906).

• Limited in the South by the above mentioned Indian Ocean, and on all three other sides by the lofty mountains, the waters of which flow down to it… the inhabitable world extending southwards from Himavant is Bharatvarsha, which is the centre of Jambudvipa. The parts named and ascribed to it are located in Al Hind alone.
  • Al-Biruni, in his Kitab ul Hind describes India (‘Al Hind’) (cited by Athar Ali, ‘The Evolution of the Perception of India’ in his Mughal India, p. 110) and in [4]

• The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.
  • Al-Biruni, Alberuni’s India, quoted from K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims who are they, 1990

• 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. Interview with Prajwala Hegde. “You cannot die of boredom in India.” The New Indian Express., Bangalore. June 07, 2012.

• The land created by the gods and stretching from Himalayas to the Indu (i.e.Southern) ocean is called Hindusthan.
  • Brihaspati Agama, Quoted in Golwalkar, M. Bunch of Thoughts.

• This multitude of men does not consist of an abject and barbarous people…but a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods… There is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history, the guides of the people whilst living, and their consolation in death; a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities, not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the Bank of England; whose credit had often supported a tottering State, and preserved their governments in the midst of war and desolation; millions of ingenious manufacturers and mechanics; millions of the most diligent, and not the least intelligent, tillers of the earth.
  • Edmund Burke, speech in the House of Commons on India (1 December 1783), quoted in The Parliamentary Register: Or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Volume XII (1782), p. 216

• The area extending from the Himalayas in the north to the sea and a thousand yojanas wide from east to west is the area of operation of the King-Emperor.
  • Chakravarti-kshetra as described by Chanakya (Kautilya): Arthashastra 9:1:17 (tr. L.N. Rangarajan), quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.457

• Indians would certainly try to understand the fact that for more than a hundred years in the late fourth, third and early second centuries BC, there was a state which controlled the entire natural geographical domain of south Asia. Not even the British controlled such a large area for such a long period. This fact should in any case be one of the answers to the notion that there have only been divisive tendencies in the political history of India.
  • Chakrabarti, D. K., 1997. Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.

• India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.
  • Winston Churchill, speech at Royal Albert Hall, London (18 March 1931)

• I learned that Bharat is the most ancient source of living wisdom (spirituality) and that it has always generated its revelations world wide.
  • Keith Critchlow, an architect known for his works on sacred geometry and also a former professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art in London. As quoted in “Indian Ethos and Values in Management“, McGraw Hill India, 2011.

• Powerful empires existed and flourished here (in India) while Englishmen were still wandering, painted, in the woods, and while the British Colonies were still a wilderness and a jungle. India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe.
  • Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India, in his address at the Great Delhi Durbar in 1901. Quoted from Avinash PAtra in “Curzon Exposed Through Avinash Patra”

• India has many strengths which make it one of the greatest countries in the world. I believe India’s greatest strength is the Indian people, in particular their spiritual devotion and purity. Many Indians see beyond illusion and understand the deeper meaning is best displayed by the custom of bowing of life. Perhaps this to the God within when greeting another person. Many Western people visit India to find spiritual inspiration, clarity and renewal. This focus on the deeper reality of humanity’s oneness with nature and each other is needed to address growing environmental and social problems around the world. The Indian people model the peace, wisdom, love and respect needed to achieve the beautiful, prosperous, sustainable world that all humanity seeks.
  • Frank Dixon, Former Director – Research, Innovest Venture Partners. As quoted in “Environmental Management“, Oxford University Press, 2015.

• 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.
  • Will Durant, The Case for India (1931)

• It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such questionable 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. As invention, industry and trade bind the continents together, or as they fling us into conflict with Asia, we shall study its civilizations more closely, and shall absorb, even in enmity, some of its ways and thoughts. 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 unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, pacifying love for all living things.
  • Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage. Quoted from Stephen Knapp, Mysteries of the Ancient Vedic Empire [5]

• Scant justice is done to her position in the world by those histories which recount the exploits of her invaders and leave the impression that her own people were a feeble, dreamy folk, sundered from the rest of mankind by their sea and mountain frontiers. Such a picture takes no account of the intellectual conquests of the Hindus. Even their political conquests were not contemptible and were remarkable for the distance if not for the extent of the territory occupied. … But such military or commercial invasions are insignificant compared with the spread of Indian thought.
  • Sir Charles Elliot, HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM, [6] quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [7]

• Long centuries before any foreigner had settled in India, the unity of the country was materialized in symbols. What more suggestive than that, for instance, of Sati, Siva’s consort, whose body, divided after her death in fity-one pieces, is lying still in fifty-one different places, theorfore revered as ‘tithasthans’, throughout the Indian peninsula?… The final editing fo the Ramayana and the Mhahabharata is not dated later than the first encturies AD, and they are fully familiar with the concept and surface of India, as are Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsha and the Puranas.
  • Elst, Koenraad. The Saffron Swastika (2001)

• The inhabitants of this land are religious, affectionate, hospitable, genial and frank. They are fond of scientific pursuits, inclined to austerity of life, seekers after justice, contented, industrious, capable in affairs, loyal, truthful and constant… They one and all believe in the unity of God, and as to the reverence they pay to the images of stone and wood and the like, which simpletons regard as idolatry, it is not so.
  • Ain-i-Akbari by Abul Fazl. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

• The English have taught us that we were not one nation before and that it will require centuries before we become one nation. This is without foundation. We were one nation before they came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us.
  • Mahatma Gandhi: Hind Swaraj, Chapter ix [8]

• I do not wish to suggest that because we were one nation we had no differences, but it is submitted that our leading men travelled throughout India . . . They learned one another’s languages . . . they saw that India was one undivided land so made by nature. They, therefore, argued that it must be one nation. Arguing thus, they established holy places in various parts of India, and fired the people with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world. Any two Indians are one as no two Englishmen are.
  • Mahatma Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and other writings. 1997. CUP

• This vast land… had been a single indivisible whole since times immemorial. Bharatavarsha had been termed by the ancients as the cradle of varnãšrama-dharma, witness to the wheel of the caturyugas, and the kshetra for chakravãrtya, spiritual as well as political. This historical memory and cultural tradition was alive as late as the imperial Guptas. Kalidasa had clothed it in immortal poetry in his far-famed Raghuvamša.
  • S.R. Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

• India as a land of Desire iced an essential element in general history. From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to pining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the earth presents, treasures of nature ‑ pearls, diamonds, perfumes, rose essences, lions, elephants, etc. ‑ as also treasures of wisdom. The way by which these treasures have passed to the West has at all tins been a matter of world historical importance bound up with the fate of nations.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, quoted in Panikkar, K. M. (1953). Asia and Western dominance, a survey of the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498-1945, by K.M. Panikkar. London: G. Allen and Unwin.

• India 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.
  • Hermann Hesse. source: Hermann Hesse: A Collection of Criticism, Fudith Sielemann . Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• Its water is dark; its fruit is bitter and poisonous; its land is stony, and its earth is saltish. A small army will soon be annihilated there…
  • Hakim’s report about Hind and Sindh to Caliph Uthman who thought about invading North-western India. The Chachnama. Quoted in Misra, R. G. (2005). Indian resistance to early Muslim invaders up to 1206 A.D. p.17
  • Also translated as : Water is scarce, the fruits are poor, and the robbers are bold; if few troops are sent, they will be slain, if many, they will starve to death. Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, Vol. 1, 116. quoted in Balakrishna, S. Invaders and infidels: From Sindh to Delhi : the 500- year journey of Islamic invasions. New Delhi : BloomsBury, 2021.

• Their honesty is proverbial. They borrow and lend on word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown.
  • Keir Hardie about Indians. Quoted from Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage.

• The cup of India is brimful of the wine of truth. All philosophers of the western world (have acknowleged) Rāma of India. It is the result of elegant thoughts of Indians that the loftiness of India is higher than the sky. In this country thousands of persons with angelic worth were born and on account of them the name of India is so famous. India is proud of the existence of Rāma. Discerning minds regard him as the Imam of India. It is the miracle of this light of righteousness that India’s evening is brighter than world’s morning.
  • Muhammad Iqbal, in an Urdu poem captioned ‘Raam’ which is compiled in his book ‘Bang-e-Dara’. quoted in Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited.

• The Indians are naturally inclined to justice and never depart from it in their actions. Their good faith, honesty and fidelity to their engagements are well known.
  • Al-Idrisi, middle of 12th century CE. Elliot and Dowson, I.88. Quoted in Misra, R. G. (2005). Indian resistance to early Muslim invaders up to 1206 A.D. p.15

• Great and enduring civilizations like those of the Hindus and the Chinese were built upon this foundation and developed from it a discipline of self-knowledge which they brought to a high pitch of refinement both in philosophy and practice.
  • Carl Jung. source: Hindu Culture, K. Guru Dutt. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• Incredible India!
  • Amitabh Kant, as quoted in Branding India : an incredible story (2009), by Amitabh Kant Sunil

• India is like a bride which has got two beautiful and lustrous eyes—Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye.
  • Syed Ahmed Khan, Writings and Speeches of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Nachiketa Publications (1972), p. 160.
  • Variant: “India is a beautiful bride and Hindus and Muslims are her two eyes. If one of them is lost, this beautiful bride will become ugly.” Quoted in Shirali, Aresh (10 August 2017). “The Enigma of Aligarh”. Open Magazine.

• Oh Hindus and Mussalmans, do you inhabit any country other than India? Do you not both live here on the same land and are you not buried in this land or cremated on the ghats of this land? You live here and die here. Therefore remember that Hindu and Mussalman are words of religious significance otherwise Hindus, Mussalmans and Christians who live in this country constitute one nation.
  • Syed Ahmed Khan, Writings and Speeches of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Nachiketa Publications (1972), p. 266.
  • Variant: “O Hindus and Muslims! Do you belong to a country other than India? Don’t you live on the soil and are you not buried under it or cremated on its ghats? If you live and die on this land, then bear in mind that ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ is but a religious word: all the Hindus, Muslims and Christians who live in this country are one nation.” Quoted in Shirali, Aresh (10 August 2017). “The Enigma of Aligarh”. Open Magazine.

• India, as everyone knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and sepoys
  • R. Kipling 1987. Kipling, R. ‘Yoked with an Unbeliever’. In Plain Tales from the Hills . Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1987. Quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• When you write `native, ‘who do you mean? The Mahommedan who hates the Hindu; the Hindu who hates the Mahommedan; the Sikh who loathes both; or the semi-anglicised product of our Indian colleges who is hated and despised by Sikh, Hindu and Mahommedan.
  • R. Kipling on Indians, quoted from Ibn, W. (2009). Defending the West: A critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books.

• People try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all. In India at least there can be no excuse for such customs, for the duty of harmlessness is well-known to all.
  • Jiddu Krishnamurti, At the Feet of the Master (1911)

• India is a land of warm affections and abiding loyalities.
  • Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, Governor-General of India, quoted in reply to the address of welcome from the Mayor, 1st April 1936. also quoted in Speeches and Statements of Lord Linlithgow, p. 1, 1946.
• You’d have to be brain dead to live in India and not be affected by Hinduism. It’s not like Christianity in America, where you feel it only on Sunday mornings … if you go to church at all. Hinduism is an on-going daily procedure. You live it, you breathe it. … Hinduism has a playful aspect which I’ve not experienced in any other religion. Its not so righteous or sober as is Christianity, nor is it puritanical. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy India. I wake up in the morning, and I’m very content.
  • Marcus Leatherdale, Canadian photographer, quoted in “Banaras: Eclipsed by a camera : The timeless portraits of Marcus Leatherdale” in Hinduism Today (March 1997)

• That land where the black antelope naturally roams, one must know to be fit for the performance of sacrifices; (the tract) different from that (is) the country of the Mlekkhas.
  • Manu Smriti 2.23, as quoted in Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001), by Koenraad Elst

• India is the great democratic miracle of the world.
  • Paul D. Miller, American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy (2016), p. 176

• India has given the world neither community nor communalism. Our saints and sages (Rishis and Munis) and traditions have given the world spiritualism and not communalism.
  • Narendra Modi, as quoted in “India has given spiritualism, not communalism to world: PM Narendra Modi”, The Times of India, January 10, 2016.

• If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well 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 who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life… again I should point to India.
  • Max Müller, India, What Can It Teach Us (1882) Lecture IV

• I will now, O chastiser of foes, describe to thee that country as I have heard of it. Listen to me, O king, as I speak of what thou hast asked me. Mahendra, Malaya, Sahya, Suktimat, Rakshavat, Vindhya, and Paripatra,–these seven are the Kala-mountains 1 (of Bharatvarsha). Besides these, O king, there are thousands of mountains that are unknown, of hard make, huge, and having excellent valleys. Besides these there are many other smaller mountains inhabited by barbarous tribes. Aryans and Mlecchas, O Kauravya, and many races, O lord, mixed of the two elements, drink the waters of the following rivers, viz., magnificent Ganga, Sindhu, and Saraswati; of Godavari, and Narmada, and the large river called Yamuna… and Mandakini, and Supunya, Sarvasanga, O Bharata, are all mothers of the universe and productive of great merit. Besides these, there are rivers, by hundreds and thousands, that are not known (by names), I have now recounted to thee, O king, all the rivers as far as I remember.
  • Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata [9]

• India itself cannot be viewed only as a bundle of the old and the new, accidentally and uncomfortably pieced together, an artificial construct without a natural unity. Nor is she just a repository of quaint, fashionable accessories to Western lifestyles; nor a junior partner in a global capitalist world. India is its own distinct and unified civilization with a proven ability to manage profound differences, engage creatively with various cultures, religions and philosophies, and peacefully integrate many diverse streams of humanity. These values are based on ideas about divinity, the cosmos and humanity that stand in contrast to the fundamental assumptions of Western civilization.
  • Malhotra, Rajiv (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• Indians tend to be more relaxed in unpredictable situations than westerners. Indians indeed find it natural to engage in non-linear thinking, juxtaposing opposites and tackling complexities that cannot be reduced to simple concepts or terms. They may be said even to thrive on ambiguity, doubt, uncertainty, multitasking, and in the absence of centralized authority and normative codes. Westerners, by contrast, tend by and large to be fearful of unpredictable or decentralized situations. They regard these situations as ‘problems’ to be ‘fixed’.
  • Malhotra, Rajiv (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• Bharat has been an inspiration to me through her great gift to the modern world, Mahatma Gandhi, and the incredible tradition of spirituality from which he came. India doubtless needs some things today from the West — not the ones she has chosen to adopt, namely the materialism and superficiality, rather the West’s efficiency and organization. But the West needs even more badly India’s humanity and spirituality, which is unrivalled by any culture I know of, past or present.
  • Michael Nagler, Professor Emeritus – Languages, University of California, Berkeley. As quoted in “Indian Ethos and Values in Management“, McGraw Hill India, 2011.

• It was narrated that Thawban, the freed slave of the Messenger of Allah, said: “The Messenger of Allah said: ‘There are two groups of my Ummah whom Allah will free from the Fire: The group that invades India (taghzoo al-hind), and the group that will be with ‘Isa bin Maryam, peace be upon him.'”
  • Ghazwa-e-hind. Al-Nasa’i, Al-Sunan al-Sughra (one of the six major hadiths). Sunan an-Nasa’i 1:25:3177 (hasan) from The Book of Jihad, chapter “Invading India”

• Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment, we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru, in: Quicktime excerpt and in: Rediscovery of India, The: A New Subcontinent, Orient Blackswan, 1 January 1999, p. 191
  • Excerpts from his speech delivered on the eve of declaration of Independence, on 14 August 1947, at the midnight hour declaring Independence of India on 15 August 1947.

• I don’t like the Indians. […] “Let the Indians squeal. Let the liberals squeal. I want a public relations program developed to piss on the Indians. I want to piss on them for their responsibility. I want the Indians blamed for this, you know what I mean? We can’t let these goddamn, sanctimonious Indians get away with this. They’ve pissed on us on Vietnam for 5 years, Henry.
  • Richard Nixon to H. Kissinger during Bangladesh Liberation War, quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• My confidence in our shared future is grounded in my respect for India’s treasured past—a civilization that has been shaping the world for thousands of years. Indians unlocked the intricacies of the human body and the vastness of our universe. And it is no exaggeration to say that our information age is rooted in Indian innovations—including the number zero…. Instead of succumbing to division, you have shown that the strength of India—the very idea of India—is its embrace of all colours, castes and creeds … It’s the richness of faiths celebrated by a visitor to my hometown of Chicago more than a century ago—the renowned Swami Vivekananda…India not only opened our minds, she expanded our moral imaginations. With religious texts that still summon the faithful to lives of dignity and discipline. With a poet who imagined a future ’Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’—and with a man whose message of love and justice endures—the father of your nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
  • Barack Obama. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. [10]

• Over the years of sovereign development your country has achieved impressive results in social-economic, industrial and scientific spheres. Today India as an authoritative member of world community plays an important role in UN, SCO, BRICS, other global and regional structures.
  • Vladimir Putin (Russian President) on India’s 66th Independence Day [11]

• India represents the new world in a unique sense. Traditionally democracies were trying to bring equality to all walks of life, today there is a change. Democracy wants to enable every country to have the equal right to be different; it’s a collection of differences, not an attempt to force or impose equality on every country. I think India is the greatest show of how so many differences in language, in sects can coexist facing great suffering and keeping full freedom… Many of the countries in the Middle East should learn from you how to escape poverty. You didn’t escape poverty by getting American dollars or Russian Roubles but by introducing your own internal reforms and by understanding that the new call of modernity is science. In between the spiritual wealth of Gandhi and the earthly wisdom of Nehru, you combined a great performance of spirit and practice to escape poverty…I know you still have a long way to go but you do it without compromising freedom. The temptation when you’re such a large country to introduce discipline and imposition is great but you tried to do it, to make progress not with force and discipline but in an open way. Many of us were educated on the literature of India when we fell in love we read Rabindranath Tagore and when we matured we tried to understand Gandhi.
  • Shimon Peres (Israeli President), on India. Israeli President Shimon Peres praises India as greatest ‘show of co-existence’ (4 December 2012)

• Like every old civilisation still represented on this globe, India has been, and is, increasingly, in spite of appearances, returning to its original sources… It is from the depths of that old civilisation that India is most likely to draw the strength needed to adapt itself to the modern world.
  • Amaury de Riencourt, The Soul of India. Quoted in K.R. Malkani: Indian Express New Delhi, 27 July 1995 ‘One country, one people’ [Section V, 13. Secret of BJP’s success] and quoted from Time for stock taking, whither Sangh Parivar? Edited by Goel, S. R. (1997)

• At the foundation of all other American perceptions was the view that India was a land of mystery, exotic and inscrutable. … A veil seemed to hang over the country, preventing observers from seeing its features clearly … Even those who understood East Asia, however, confessed themselves baffled by India.
  • Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India , 1947-1964, 2000) 8, in Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• ‘American selves, operating largely within the categories of sexuality, race, and illness, projected onto Indian Others traits that seemed loathsome or illicit: Indians were, among other things, unsanitary, disorderly, promiscuous, and primitive.’
  • Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India , 1947-1964, 2000: 35) in Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• ‘Westerners found in Indians the very opposite of their rational self-images, exemplars of the undesirable and forbidden … If order is the desideratum of the post-Enlightenment Westerner, the dirt and disorder of India was for the Westerner an object of loathing.’
  • Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India , 1947-1964, 2000) quoted in Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• The Western representation of India as female conferred effeminacy on most Indian men. Caught in the enervating web of Hinduism, the majority of Indian men had been deprived of their manliness and their virility. In the context of gender, it is possible to discern three features that Westerners historically assigned to most Indian men. The first of these was passivity and its more exaggerated forms; the second was emotionalism; the third was a lack of heterosexual energy … Hindu men were passive, servile, and cowardly …They could endure anything, evidently without suffering from a sense of shame because of their inaction. They did not resist oppressors but rather regarded them with stupefying indifference … The exaggerated form of passivity was servility. This, Westerners declared, Hindu men had in abundance. Many implicitly subscribed to John Stuart Mill’s observation that ‘in truth, the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of the slave’.
  • Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India , 1947-1964, 2000). quoted from Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• “I have had before me,” says a British judge in India, “hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it.
  • Colonel Sleeman, 1835-6. Quoted from Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage. (also quoted by Max Muller)

• The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We [Westerners] 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, Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• Indeed how many were the seers and sages, poets and prophets – right from the Vedic age upto the modern times – who had fostered in the nation’s breast the integrated and whole picture of Bharat as the Divine Mother. Bharat, in their eyes, was not a mere clod of clay. It was verily the Matrubhoomi, the Punyabhoomi, the Dharmabhoomi, the Devabhoomi, the Karmabhoomi – all sublimated into one single majestic figure of Bharat Mata. To Bankimchandra, She appeared as the triple manifestation of Saraswati, Lakshmi and Durga. Rabindranath Tagore visualised Her as Devi bhuvana-mana-mohini – the divine enchantress of the world. To Swami Vivekananda, She was the Mother of all the thirty-three crores of gods and goddesses – whose worship would gratify all those myriad deities. Guruji Golwalkar visualised Her as Trinity of Mata – the loving mother, Pita – the protecting father, and Guru – the elevating spiritual guide. The unity of Bharat is so basic to its nature, so sublime in its depths – in fact, an inseparable aspect of its national soul.
  • H. V. Sheshadri: The Tragic Story of Partition, Bangalore Jagarana Prakashana 1982, p.9.

• India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.
  • Hu Shih, quoted in Consolation of Mind (2004). by H. K. Suhas, p. 111.

• We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity… We know that all peoples came there to draw the elements of their knowledge… India, in her splendour, gave religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their fables and their wisdom.
  • Pierre Sonnerat: Voyage aux Indes orientales et a la Chine, Paris, 1782. Quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [12]

• 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, as quoted in Science & Technology in India Through the Ages, p. 213

• They have made present-day India, and Hinduism even more so, out to be a zoo – an agglomeration of assorted, disparate specimens. No such thing as ‘India’, just a geographical expression, just a construct of the British… – that has been their stance…. Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’… And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony. This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it… India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation…
  • Arun Shourie (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.

• What India has been, the whole world is now. The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility. And the moment is arriving when you also must find a basis of unity which is not political. If India can offer to the world her solution, it will be a contribution to humanity. There is only one history — the history of Man. All national histories are merely chapters in the larger one.
  • Rabindranath Tagore, “Nationalism in the West”, 1917. Reprinted in Rabindranath Tagore and Mohit K. Ray, Essays (2007, p. 492).

• I cannot but bring to your mind those days when the whole of Eastern Asia, from Burma to Japan was united with India in the closest ties of friendship…
  • Rabindranath Tagore, Essays, Nationalism in Japan, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 2007 p.471, and quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [13]

• 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 into a single family.
  • Arnold Joseph Toynbee. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• India has a true friend in the White House.
  • Donald Trump, Indian Express

• This is indeed 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 prince and alien peasant, 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 the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), Ch. XXXVIII Some sources also include the following: “Our most valuable and most constructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.”

• Famine is India’s specialty. Elsewhere famines are inconsequential incidents — in India they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions.
  India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
  With her everything is on a giant scale — even her poverty; no other country can show anything to compare with it. And she has been used to wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the expressions describing great sums.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), Ch. XLIII

• India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), Ch. XLIII

• 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 round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked. Always, when you think you have come to the end of her tremendous specialties and have finished hanging tags upon her as the Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another specialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlooking the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy — the Land of Murderous Wild Creatures. Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), Ch. LVII

• With the support of Universal knowledge and our heritage, we shall create a Bharat which will excel all its past glories, and will enable every citizen in its fold to steadily progress in the development of his manifold latent possibilities and to achieve through a sense of unity with the entire creation, a state even higher than that of a complete human being; to become Narayan from nar (man). This is the external divine form of our culture. This is our message to humanity at a cross roads. May God give us strength to succeed in this mission.
  • Deendayal Upadhyaya , Integral Humanism, quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

• The country north of the sea and south of the Himalayas
  Is Bharata and her children are Bharati.
  A thousand yojanas from north to south,
  It has kiratas in the east and yavanas in the west.
  • Vishnu Purana 2.3, verses 1, 8 quoted in The Idea of India: A historical corrective By Shonaleeka Kaul. Different translation: To the north of the oceans and the south of the Himalayas lies the land of Bharata, inhabited by Bharatis. Visnu Purana, quoted in The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993) by S. Talageri

• Swami Vivekananda often spoke of the future greatness of India as surpassing all her glories of the past.
  • Swami Nikhilananda, Swami Vivekânanda : A Biography (1975); the “vaisya” represent those primarily living at the mercantile levels of human motivation, and the sudra represent the working class, or laborers.

• This is the ancient land where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country, the same India whose influx of spirituality is represented, as it were, on the material plane, by rolling rivers like oceans, where the eternal Himalayas, rising tier above tier with their snowcaps, look as it were into the very mysteries of heaven. Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the feet of the greatest sages that ever lived. Here first sprang up inquiries into the nature of man and into the internal world. Here first arose the doctrines of the immortality of the soul, the existence of a supervising God, an immanent God in nature and in man, and here the highest ideals of religion and philosophy have attained their culminating points. This is the land from whence, like the tidal waves, spirituality and philosophy have again and again rushed out and deluged the world, and this is the land from whence once more such tides must proceed in order to bring life and vigour into the decaying races of mankind. It is the same India which has withstood the shocks of centuries, of hundreds of foreign invasions of hundreds of upheavals of manners and customs. It is the same land which stands firmer than any rock in the world, with its undying vigour, indestructible life. Its life is of the same nature as the soul, without beginning and without end, immortal; and we are the children of such a country.
  • Vivekananda, The Future of India, CW vol 3.

• India is truly a mystery containing all that is the worthiest, most spiritual, and intellectual in humankind and the worst aspects of humankind one could ever hope to find including total lack of concern for others, extreme material poverty, and spiritual bankruptcy and fraud. India is the world in other words with everything in the world revealed both of the highest form and lowest denominator. I love India. I hate India. I cannot ever go to India without returned with strong feelings about it. My later writings would not be the same without my frequent stays in India and the influences that this country has had on my thoughts and feelings. If India did not exist, we would create it just as it is perfect in its imperfection.
  • Dr Fred Alan Wolf (Author of Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists). As quoted in “Indian Ethos and Values in Management“, McGraw Hill India, 2011.

• The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. In these favorable conditions, they built a character meditative and peaceful and a nation of philosophers such as could have existed except nowhere in India.
  • H.G. Wells. source: The Outline of History, H.G. Wells. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• The ordinary people … are upright and honourable… They are faithful to their oaths and promises… In their behavior there is much gentleness and sweetness.
  • Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang/Yuan Chwang in the 7th century commenting on the people of India. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

• They do not practice deceit, and they keep their sworn obligations. . . . They will not take anything wrongfully, and they yield more than fairness requires.”
  • Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang/Yuan Chwang. Quoted from Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage.

• “On examination, we find that the names of India (T’ien-chu) are various and perplexing as to their authority. It was anciently called Shin-tu, also Hien-tau; but now, according to the right pronunciation, it is called In-tu. The people of In-tu call their country by different names according to their district. Each country has diverse customs. Aiming at a general name which is the best sounding, we will call the country In-tu. In Chinese this name signifies the Moon. The moon has many names, of which this is one. For as it is said that all living things ceaselessly revolve in the wheel (of transmigration) through the long night of ignorance, without a guiding star, their case is like (the world), the sun gone down; as then the torch affords its connecting light, though there be the shining of the stars, how different from the bright (cool) moon; just so the bright connected light of holy men and sages, guiding the world as the shining of the moon, have made this country eminent, and so it is called In-tu.
  • Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang/Yuan Chwang (Vol. I. 69). quoted in Kishore, Kunal (2016). Ayodhyā revisited.

• India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, under used.
  • Lee Kuan Yew in the second volume of his memoirs, published in 2000, quoted at [14]

• India is an intrinsic part of this unfolding new world order. India can no longer be dismissed as a “wounded civilisation”, in the hurtful phrase of a westernised non resident Indian author (V.S. Naipaul).
  • Lee Kuan Yew – At the 37th Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture on 21st Nov 2005 in New Delhi, quoted at [15]