A Collection of Quotes on Vedanta

^"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy: by one, or more, or all of these -- and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details."
--Swami Vivekananda

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"What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like light of a higher and purer luminary, which describes a loftier course through a purer stratum -- free from particulars, simple, universal. It rises on me like the full moon after the stars have come out, wading through some far summer stratum of the sky."

-- Henry David Thoreau

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"Philosophy in India is what it ought to be, not the denial, but the fulfillment, of religion. It is the highest religion, and the oldest name of the oldest system of philosophy in India is Vedanta, that is, the end, the goal, the highest object, of the Vedas."

"...if I were asked under what sky the human mind has deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and has found some solutions which well deserve the attention, even of those who studied Plato and Kant, and who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semetic race, may draw that corrective which is most wanted to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact an eternal life, I should point to India."

-- German scholar Prof. Max Mueller

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"In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is an Indian way. The Emperor Ashoka's and Mahatma Gandhi's principle of non-violence and Sri Ramakrishna's testimony to the harmony of religions: here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together into a single family..."

"...the spirit of religious tolerance and mutual goodwill is one of India's gifts to the world. No gift could be greater and more timely in our atomic age..."

-- British Historian Arnold J. Toynbee

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"In the whole world there is no study, except that of the originals, so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat (Upanishad). It has been the solace of my life. It will be the solace of my death."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

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"If there is one place on earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days, it is India, whose spiritual development is continuously growing and has never been interrupted..."

-- French Author Romain RoUand

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"Hinduism is the oldest Living Religion -- RigVeda the oldest scripture in the world. Why has Hinduism survived so long?

Because it is an accepting and all embracing religion. It allows people to seek Truth in many ways. There is something in Hindu faith which satisfies the greatest intellectual and also the simplest soul in their search for God."

-- Patricia Bahree

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"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, self government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all."

-- Will Durant

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"Among all the great religions of the World, there is none more Catholic, more assimilative than the mass of beliefs which go to make up what is popularly known as 'Hinduism.'"

--W. Crooke (Oxford Philosopher -1896)