Talk:Indomania

Removed quotes

I removed these quotes earlier as I found them non-notable:

• It is there in (Aryavarta) we must seek not only for the cradle of the Brahmin religion but for the cradle of the high civilization of the Hindus, which gradually extended itself in the west to Ethiopia, to Egypt, to Phoenicia; in the East to Siam, to China and Japan; in the South to Ceylon, to Java and to Sumatra; in the North to Persia, to Chaldea, and to Colchis, whence it came to Greece and to Rome and at length to the distant abode of the Hyperboreons."
  • Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna (1779-1847), Die Theogonie, Philosophie und Kosmogonie der Hindus

• “I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.”
  • Voltaire, quoted in Sanskrit Reader 1: A Reader in Sanskrit Literature by Heiko Kretschmer

• An old worldview where Palestine and the Hebrews were the center of the world began to be challenged by a new one where the Indo-Europeans and their original home were seen as the creative center of the world, and ever since then India, Tibet, and the Himalayas have also assumed a special place in Western mythical geography as an alternative axis mundi to "Semitic" Jerusalem and Israel.
  • Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p. 38.

• It is misleading to label as anti-Semitic all Aryanist attacks on Judaism and Christianity that were made in the name of universalism and liberalism.
  • Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p. 108.

• One might think this position (that the English colonialist should convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India
  • Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln, 1999. p. 68.

• The enthusiasm for Indian culture was widespread. Amaury de Riencourt in his The Soul of India tells us that philosophers like Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher, poets such as Goethe, Schillar, Novalis, Tieck and Brentano, historians like Herder and Schlegel, all acclaimed the discovery of Indian culture with cries of ecstasy: "India, the home of universal religion, the cradle of the noblest human race, of all literature, of all philosophies and metaphysics." And he adds that "this enthusiasm was not confined to Germany. The entire Romantic movement in the West put Indian culture on a lofty pedestal which the preceding Classical Movement had reserved for Greece and Rome."
  • Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

Surplus

• An old worldview where Palestine and the Hebrews were the center of the world began to be challenged by a new one where the Indo-Europeans and their original home were seen as the creative center of the world, and ever since then India, Tibet, and the Himalayas have also assumed a special place in Western mythical geography as an alternative axis mundi to "Semitic" Jerusalem and Israel.
  • Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p. 38.

B

• Blavatsky ([1892] 1975) likewise stated that "it has now become very clear to me that the Scandinavian, Egyptian, Greek, Central Asiatic, German and Slavonic gods were nearly all ... born in prehistoric India" (608).
  • quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 2

• It is there in (Aryavarta) we must seek not only for the cradle of the Brahmin religion but for the cradle of the high civilization of the Hindus, which gradually extended itself in the west to Ethiopia, to Egypt, to Phoenicia; in the East to Siam, to China and Japan; in the South to Ceylon, to Java and to Sumatra; in the North to Persia, to Chaldea, and to Colchis, whence it came to Greece and to Rome and at length to the distant abode of the Hyperboreons."
  • Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna (1779-1847), Die Theogonie, Philosophie und Kosmogonie der Hindus

• We believe that the day is not far off when the opponents of this fine and erudite writer will be silenced by the force of irrefutable evidence. And when facts shall once have corroborated his theories and assertions, what will the world find? That it is to India, the country less explored, and less known than any other, that all the other great nations of the world are indebted for their languages, arts, legislature, and civilization. ... But the evidence of her past glories lies in her literature. What people in all the world can boast of such a literature, which, were the Sanscrit less difficult, would be more studied than now? Hitherto the general public has had to rely for information on a few scholars who, notwithstanding their great learning and trustworthiness, are unequal to the task of translating and commenting upon more than a few books out of the almost countless number that, notwithstanding the vandalism of the missionaries, are still left to swell the mighty volume of Sanscrit literature. .... The Vedas, which are written in Sanscrit, a language whose grammatical rules and forms, as Max Muller and other scholars confess, were completely established long before the days when the great wave of emigration bore it from Asia all over the Occident, are there to proclaim their parentage of every philosophy, and every religious institution developed later among Semitic peoples.
  • Helena Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

C

• When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the fact—above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe—we discover there are 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. source: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Anthony Parel.Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

H

• 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.

• J.G. Herder also saw in India the "lost paradise of all religions and philosophies", the "cradle of humanity", the "eternal home", the "eternal Orient ... waiting to be rediscovered within ourselves". This is high praise, indeed, but it does not mean that he ever thought that India supplanted the West. Any such thought was far from his mind. What he meant was that India represented humanity's childhood, its innocence, as Hellenism represented its "adolescence" and Rome its "adulthood". Similarly, while Indians were "the gentlest branch of humanity", Christianity was the religion of "purest humanity".
  • J.G. Herder cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

• the bramins have formed their people to such a degree of gentleness, courtesy, temperance and chastity, or at least have so confirmed them in these virtues, that Europeans frequently appear, on comparison with them, as beastly, drunken or mad. In their air and language they are unconstrainedly elegant; in their behaviour, friendly; in their persons, clean; in their way of life, simple and harmless ... they are not destitute of knowledge, still less of quiet industry or nicely imitative art; even the lowest castes learn reading, writing and arithmetic. . . .
  • Herder in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe p 186

• Mankind’s origins can be traced to India, where the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue with a simplicity, strength and sublimity which has—frankly spoken—nothing, nothing at all equivalent in our philosophical, cold European world.
  • J.G. Herder. source: Sacred Jewels of Yoga: Wisdom from India’s Beloved Scriptures, Teachers, Masters and Monks, Dave DeLuca. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• O holy land [India], I salute thee, thou source of all music, thou voice of the heart and ‘Behold the East—cradle of the human race, of human emotion, of all religions.’
  • J. G. Herder. source: Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, John James Clarke. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• India has always been an object of yearning, a realm of wonder, a world of magic... India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt—more of the bliss that is man’s final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religions and philosophies, music, and dances, and the different styles of architecture.
  • Friedrich Hegel . source: A Survey of Hinduism, Klaus K. Klostermaier Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• It strikes everyone in the beginning, to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature, a land so rich in intellectual products and with the profoundest order of thought …
  • Friedrich Hegel .source: The Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for.
  • Friedrich Hegel .source: A Survey of Hinduism, Klaus K. Klostermaier Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.
  • Friedrich Hegel .source: Contesting the Master Narrative, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. and in Halbfass, Wilhelm India and Europe State University of New York Press. New York J 988 p. 2

• "India as a land of Desire formed an essential element in general history. From the most ancient times downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings to gaining 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 times been a matter of world historical importance bound up with the fate of nations."
  • in Panikkar, K M Asia and Western Dominance Collier Books 1969 New York p.21

J

• 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. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. quoted in Hindu Culture, K. Guru Dutt, and quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

K

• Immanuel Kant suggested that “The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.”
  • Kant, I. quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• ... Kant, who modified the popular arctic and astronomical theory of Bailly by placing the origin of man-kind in Tibet. "This is the highest country", he argued. "No doubt it was inhabited before any other and could even have been the site of all creation and all science. The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India."
  • Kant, in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe p. 186

M

• One might think this position (that the English colonialist should convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India
  • Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln, 1999. p. 68.

• 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"

• It is surely astounding that such a system as the Vedanta should have slowly been elaborated by the indefatigable and intrepid thinkers of India thousands of years ago, a system that even now makes us feel giddy as in mounting the last steps of the swaying spire of a Gothic cathedral. None of our philosophers, including Heraclitus, Plato, Kant or Hegel, has ventured to erect such a spire, never frightened by storms or lightning. Stone follows on stone in regular succession after once the first step has been made, after once it has been clearly seen that in the beginning there can have been One, as there will be but One in the end, whether we call it Atman or Brahman.
  • Max Müller. source: The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, Max Müller Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• “Thanks to the labors of a science which is comparatively recent, and more especially to the researches of the students of Hindu and Egyptian antiquities, it is very much easier today than it was not so long ago to discover the source, to ascend the course and unravel the underground network of that great mysterious river which since the beginning of history has been flowing beneath all the religions, all the faiths, and all the philosophies: in a word, beneath all the visible and everyday manifestations of human thought. It is now hardly to be contested that this source is to be found in ancient India. Thence in all probability the sacred teaching spread into Egypt, found its way to ancient Persia and Chaldea, permeated the Hebrew race, and crept into Greece and the north of Europe, finally reaching China and even America.”
  • Maeterlink, Maurice, in The Great Secret) (Niranjan Shah, Indian Origins of Ancient Civilizations, International Vedic Vision Foundation, New York, 2011, p.4. Quoted from Stephen Knapp, Mysteries of the Ancient Vedic Empire [1]

• "It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India." ... "Towards the Orient, to the banks of the Ganges and the Indus, it is there that our hearts feel drawn by some hidden urge - it is there that all the dark presentiments point which lie in the depths of our hearts... In the Orient, the heavens poured forth into the earth."
  • F. Majer (1771-1818) cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

S

• 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 [2]

• Everything without exception is of Indian origin...
  • Variant: Everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, Letter to Ludwig Tieck of 15 December, 1803, quoted by Leon Poliakov in The Aryan Myth, p 191. Quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [3]
  • Longer quote: "Here is the actual source of all languages, all the thoughts and poems of the human spirit; everything, everything without exception comes from India." cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

• The greatness of this people was attested by "the gigantic grandeur and durability of Egyptian and Indian architecture in contradistinction to the fragile littleness of modem buildings. This consideration will enable us," he continued, "by analogy to grasp the idea . . . that all these famous nations sprang from one stock, and that their colonies were all one people directly or indirectly, of Indian origin.... "
  • Schlegel, in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe p 191-2

• Whether directly or indirectly all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies... the oriental antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely towards the divine....
  • Friedrich Schlegel, Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, quoted by Roger-Pol Droit in L’Oubli de I’Inde, Paris Presses Universitaires de France, 1989, p. 129. Quoted in A Look at India From the Views of Other Scholars, by Stephen Knapp [4]

• There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit. India is not only at the origin of everything, she is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in comparison.
  • Friedrich Schlegel,source: Arise, O India, François Gautier. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• The Indians possessed a knowledge of the true God, conceived and expressed in noble, clear and grand language … Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealization of reason, as set forth by the Greeks, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of oriental idealism, like a feeble spark in the full flood of the noonday sun.
  • Friedrich Schlegel, source: Philosophy, Qabbala and Vedanta, Maurice Fluegel. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• Another great name belonging to this movement was that of Schopenhauer. His interest in Indian religion was first aroused by reading Anquetil Dupperon's Latin translation of Oupnekhat (1801-1802), itself a translation from a Persian version. He was deeply moved and he found its reading "the most rewarding and edifying", and its philosophy "the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death". After this he continued to take a deep interest in India. In Indians, he found the "most noble and ancient people", and their wisdom was the "original wisdom of the human race". He spoke of India as the "fatherland of mankind", which gave the "original religion of our race" and "oldest of all world view". He thought of the Upanishads as the "fruit of the most sublime human knowledge and wisdom", documents of "almost superhuman conception" whose authors could "hardly be thought of as mere mortals". He expressed the hope that European peoples "who stemmed from Asia ... would also re-attain the holy religions of their home".
  • Schopenhauer, cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

• The enthusiasm for Indian culture was widespread. Amaury de Riencourt in his The Soul of India tells us that philosophers like Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher, poets such as Goethe, Schillar, Novalis, Tieck and Brentano, historians like Herder and Schlegel, all acclaimed the discovery of Indian culture with cries of ecstasy: "India, the home of universal religion, the cradle of the noblest human race, of all literature, of all philosophies and metaphysics." And he adds that "this enthusiasm was not confined to Germany. The entire Romantic movement in the West put Indian culture on a lofty pedestal which the preceding Classical Movement had reserved for Greece and Rome."
  • Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

• Tolstoy, a late-comer, was also deeply influenced by Indian religious thought. Like Wagner, his introduction to it was through Burnouf and Schopenhauer. Beginning with his Confessions, there is no work of his "which is not inspired, in part by Hindu thought", to put it in the words of Markovitch quoted by Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance. He further adds that Tolstoy also "remains the most striking example, among a great many, of those who sought a cure for the western spirit in India".
  • Raymond Schwab, Tolstoy, cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

V

• In 1760, Voltaire acquired a copy of Ezourvedam, a forgery of the Jesuits (most probably of Di Nobili). But even this served an unintended purpose. Voltaire with his acumen saw even in this document the voice of an ancient religion. While he praised Brahmins for having "established religion on the basis of universal religion", he also found that India was the home of religion in its oldest and purest form. He described India as a country "on which all other countries had to rely, but which did not rely on anyone else". He also believed that Christianity derived from Hinduism. He wrote to and assured Frederick the Great of Prussia that "our holy Christian religion is solely based upon the ancient religion of Brahma".
  • Voltaire cited in Ram Swarup (2000). On Hinduism: Reviews and reflections. Ch. 4.

• I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.
  • Voltaire, quoted in Sanskrit Reader 1: A Reader in Sanskrit Literature by Heiko Kretschmer

• It is very important to note that some 2500 years ago at least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga 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. source: Riding the Indian Tiger, William Nobrega and Ashish Sinha. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• 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 Brahmans' science not been been long established in Europe....We have already acknowledged that arithmetic, geometry, astronomy were taught among the Brahmans. From time immemorial they have known the precession of the equinoxes and were in their calculation far closer to the real figure than the Greeks who came much later. Mr. Le Gentil (a French astronomer who spent several years in India) has with admiration acknowledged the Brahmans' science, as well as the immensity of time these Indians must have needed to reach a knowledge of which even the Chinese never had any notion, and which was unknown to Egypt and to Chaldea, the teacher of Egypt.
  • (source: Fragments historiques sur l'linde - By Voltaire p. 444 - 445. ** quoted in 'The Invasion That Never Was' by Michel Danino (1996) , [5]

• The Veda was the most precious gift for which the West has ever been indebted to the East.
  • Voltaire, source: Eclectic Magazine: Foreign Literature, John Holmes Agnew and Walter Hilliard Bidwell Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

• “Everything came to us from the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.” ... “our religion was hidden deep in India” and “incontestably comes to us from the Brahmans.” ... “Our nations have mutually destroyed each other on that very soil where we went to collect nothing but money, and where the first Greeks travelled for nothing but knowledge.”
  • Voltaire, in Jain, S., & Jain, M. (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. vol 4. Introduction

• I wholly share your opinion when you say that it is not possible for different peoples to have shared the same methods, the same knowledge, the same legends, the same superstitions, unless all these things had been adopted by a primitive nation which taught, and led astray, the rest of the world. Now I have long since regarded the dynasty of the Brahmins as having been this primitive nation. You must be familiar with the books of Mr Holwell and Mr Dow.... ·Finally, sir, I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc....'
  • Voltaire, in p. 185 Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe

• [A] peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves.
  • Voltaire, in Woodroffe, John George, Sir, Is India civilized? Essays on Indican culture. Madras, Ganesh & co., 1922. p. 36 quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
  • Of the Hindus. Should go in Hinduism

• The Greeks, in their mythology, were merely disciples of India and of Egypt.
  • Voltaire. Quoted in Les Indes Florissantes — Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750-1820), by Guy Deleury (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), p. 663. and in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

• No sooner did India begin to be known to the Occident's barbarians than she was the object of their greed, so when these barbarians became civilized and industrious, and created new needs for themselves... The Albuquerques and their successors succeeded in supplying Europe with pepper and paintings only through carnage.
  • Voltaire , Fragments hist sur l'Inde, quoted in 'The Invasion That Never Was' by Michel Danino (1996)

• Nixon said that American public opinion had been duped by India: “there’s a huge public relations campaign here. Many of our friends in the other party, and including, I must say, some of the nuts in our own party, soft-heads, have jumped on, have completely bought the Indian line. And India has a very great propaganda line.”
  • Richard Nixon, Nixon quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Sir William Jones, the first Indologist to attempt a serious synchronization of biblical and Puranic chronology, exemplifies the tensions of his time. His predecessors, British scholars John Holwell, Nathaniel Halhed, and Alexander Dow—all associated in various capacities with the British East India Trading Company—had relayed back to an eager Europe gleanings from Puranic sources that described an immense antiquity for the human race.1 These provided the ranks of disaffected Christians, such as the vociferous Voltaire, with valuable materials with which to attempt to shake off the constraints of Judeo-Christian chronology and to refute Jewish or Christian claims to exclusive mediation between man and Providence. Holwell, for one, believed that the Hindu texts contained a higher revelation than the Christian ones, that they predated the Flood, and that "the mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins".
  • John Holwell quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 1. (Marshall 1970, 46).

• In 1807, the well-known metaphysician Schelling could wonder "what is Europe really but a sterile trunk which owes everything to Oriental grafts?" (Poliakov 1971, 11). A year later, the influential Friedrich von Schlegel argued that "the Northwest of India must be consid- ered the central point from which all of these nations had their origin" (505). In 1845, Eichhoff was adamant that "all Europeans come from the Orient. This truth, which is confirmed by the evidence of physiology and linguistics, no longer needs special proof (12). Michelet held that the Vedas "were undoubtedly the first monument of the world" (1864, 26) and that from India emanated "a torrent of light and the flow of reason and Right" (485). He proclaimed that "the migrations of mankind follow the route of the sun from East to West along the sun's course. . . . At its starting point, man arose in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world" (Febvre 1946, 95-96).
  • quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 1.

• Oriental studies have never been so intensive.... In the century of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist, today one is an Orientalist.... The Orient has become a sort of general preoccupation.... We shall see great things. The old Asiatic barbarism may not be as devoid of higher men as our civilization would like to believe.
  • Victor Hugo. in Jean Biès, Littérature française et pensée hindoue des origines à 1950 in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

• India made, more loudly than anyone, what we might call the “declaration of the rights of the Being.” There, in this divine self, in this society of the infinite with itself, lies clearly the foundation, the root of all life and all history.
  • Edgar Quinet in Jean Biès, Littérature française et pensée hindoue des origines à 1950 in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

• The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice.... Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk.
  • J Michelet,in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

• Lamartine, for instance, said of Hindu philosophy, “It is the Ocean, we are but its clouds.... The key to everything is in India.”
  • Lamartine, in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

• … The deepest opposition [between the West and India] rests on the fact that the fundamental evidence of the West, whether Christian or atheist, is death, whatever meaning the West gives to it, whereas India’s fundamental evidence is the infinite of life in the infinite of time: “Who could kill immortality?”
  • Andre Malraux, in India’s Impact on French Thought and Literature: Eighteenth to Twentieth Century by Michel Danino (Published in Critical Practice, X:2, June 2003, pp. 46-56)

• • • Much of this is quotable, but needs reformatting. Quotes should not be given in the form "X says "...."" Ficaia (talk) 15:38, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ficaia, if it is quotable as you say, why not just leave them in the article and add a cleanup template and a note on talk? Readers will still have the benefit of the quotes, know about the cleanup issue, and eventually it will be fixed by the readers. I have myself sometimes fixed such cleanup issues on other pages. There are plenty of quotable quotes that should be on the mainpage. You are being extremely strict on issues like formatting etc when across other wikiquote pages the culture is much less strict. --ᘙ (talk) 09:56, 4 July 2024 (UTC)