Victor Cousin Quotes

My music and lyrics became an extension of this Indian philosophy.

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

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

If I was asked what is the greatest treasure which India possesses and what is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly that it is the Samskrit language and literature and all that it contains. This is a magnificent inheritance and so long as this endures and influences the life of our people, so long will the basic genius of India continue. If our race forgot the Buddha, the Upanishads and the great epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata), India would cease to be India .

In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation.

The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.

To many, Indian thought, Indian manners; Indian customs, Indian philosophy, Indian literature are repulsive at the first sight; but let them persevere, let them read, let them become familiar with the great principles underlying these ideas, and it is ninety-nine to one that the charm will come over them, and fascination will be the result. Slow and silent, as the gentle dew that falls in the morning, unseen and unheard yet producing a most tremendous result, has been the work of the calm, patient, all-suffering spiritual race upon the world of thought.

As Lao Tzu says, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao".

My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.

When I feel off, I read the 'Tao Te Ching' to get my equilibrium right. I started reading it in the eleventh grade.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

Much of Indian science seems intuitive and not bound by the rigid thinking of classical scientists.

The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

The land of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and Subash Chandra Bose has mesmerised me. I am really happy to meet such lovely people, good and kindhearted people.

A lot of my friends have told me to read 'Tao Te Ching' - a classic Chinese text on the fundamentals of Taoism.

The grandeur of a philosophy does not certify its truth.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.

Yoga is a product of Eastern thought. A further complication is that the early Yoga teachers were both Indian and Hindu. So from the late 1800's and early 1900's the Yoga teachers who came across were as interested in Hinduism as in Yoga. Often what we were being taught was a mixture of two different systems.

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.

The Gita is like a bouquet composed of the beautiful flowers of spiritual truths collected from the Upanishads.

Whatever else India may not be, she is at least one thing, She is the greatest storehouse of spiritual knowledge.

Historically, the East was more concerned with understanding the mind and the West was more involved in understanding matter.