quotations about India
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
How India Earns, Spends and Saves
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 My Love: A Spiritual Journey
India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.
HU SHIH
attributed, Consolation of Mind
India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, under used.
LEE KUAN YEW
Memoirs
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, "You cannot die of boredom in India", The New Indian Express, June 7, 2012
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
attributed, Political Ideas in Modern India
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
Slowly Down the Ganges
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
Talking India
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
The Great Indian Novel
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
The Message of India to Japan: A Lecture
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
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
MARK TWAIN
Following the Equator
India is the accumulated treasure of spiritual truths discovered by the Rishis.
ADI SANKARACHARYA
attributed, India's Priceless Heritage
If India had a Latin version of the American motto E Pluribus Unum, it would be E Pluribus Pluribum.
SHASHI THAROOR
Nehru: The Invention of India
India is a great paradox. It is a strange combination of outstanding achievements as well as grave failures.
NEERA CHANDHOKE & PRAVEEN PRIYADARSHI
Contemporary India: Economy, Society, Politics
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
"Nationalism in the West"
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
Indian Unity
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
Bookless in Baghdad
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
attributed, "Indian Ethos and Values in Management", India
Indians are the Italians of Asia ... They are both people of the Madonna--they demand a goddess, even if the religion does not provide one. 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. The language of India and the language of Italy, they mlake every man a poet, and make something beautiful from every banalité. These are nations where love--amore, pyaar--makes a cavalier of a Borsalino on a street corner, and makes a princess of a peasant girl, if only for the second that her eyes meet yours. It is the secret of my love for India.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS
Shantaram