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Quotes about Hinduism

Hinduism, also known as Sanatana Dharma or Vedic dharma, is one of the most interesting religions that has invoked curiosity among people from diverse backgrounds.

The quotes given below are to show you what others (who were not born and brought up in an Indian or Hindu environment) have thought about Hinduism.

Hinduism is synonymous with Humanism. That is its essence and its great liberating equality.

H. G. Wells

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

Hinduism is so elastic and subtle that the most profound Methodist and crudest Idolator are equally at home with it.

George Bernard Shaw

The ultimate goal of human life is to transcend culture and personality to the unconditioned pure being. But the means to do this is through our culture and way of life.

David Frawley

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

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

Mark Twain

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.

Romain Rolland

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

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

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

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

The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.

Aldous Huxley

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain, American author

From the Vedas, we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.

William James, American Author

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

William Jones, British Orientalist

It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in 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, British Historian

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

Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer, in ‘Works VI’

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

Colonel James Todd

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

Lancelot Hogben, in ‘Mathematics for the Millions'”

The surgery of the ancient Indian physicians was bold and skillful. A special branch of surgery was dedicated to rhinoplasty or operations for improving deformed ears, noses and forming new ones, which European surgeons have now borrowed.

Sir W. Hunter, British Surgeon

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

Sir John Woodroffe

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

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

B.G. Rele, in ‘The Vedic Gods’