Indian Sages Quotes & Sayings

It is simply not true that "religion" is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and created the ideal of ahimsa, "nonviolence." The medieval Peace and Truce of God forced knights to stop terrorizing the poor and outlawed violence from Wednesday to Sunday each week. Most dramatically, after the Bar Kokhba war, the rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures so effectively that Jews refrained from political aggression for a millennium. Such successes have been rare. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative. — Karen Armstrong

Awareness ultimately has no boundaries. It exists in this world but endlessly goes beyond it. The world's great wisdom traditions all derive from a higher reality that is indescribable but can be experienced. This is the greatest wonder and source of awe. As the ancient Indian sages declare, "This isn't knowledge that you learn. It's knowledge that you become." When you fully absorb this insight, you know what it means to transcend. You don't need to travel anywhere; all of reality exists in you. You exemplify wholeness because you are united with everything and everyone around you. You exist to demonstrate that human beings can reach the infinite, and by simply being who you are, you help others get there. — Deepak Chopra

Indian sages avoided the written word as they realized ideas were never definitive; they were transformed depending on the intellectual and emotional abilities of the giver as well as the receiver. — Devdutt Pattanaik

I am pain-stricken to say, since the moment I was born, I have found nothing extraordinary in this ancient land of greatness to be exceptionally proud of. I am not a proud Indian. India at its present condition has given me no reason to feel proud.
However, I do feel proud of the ancient Indians, just like I feel proud of the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians and so on. Scientists are beyond borders, just like the ancient scientists of India, whom you prefer to call as sages. — Abhijit Naskar

Socrates' dialectic was a Greek, rational version of the Indian brahmodya, the competition that attempted to formulate absolute truth but always ended in silence. For the Indian sages, the moment of insight came when they realized the inadequacy of their words, and thus intuited the ineffable. In that final moment of silence, they had sensed the brahman, even though they could not define it coherently. Socrates was also trying to elicit a moment of truth, when his interlocutors appreciated the creative profundity of human ignorance. — Anonymous

The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:
1. To have been born a human being, capable of concious inquiry.
2. To have been born - or to have developed - a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.
3. To have found a living spiritual master. — Elizabeth Gilbert