Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Quotes

The East and the West are not so sharply divided as the alarmists would make us believe. The products of spirit and intelligence, the positive sciences, the engineering techniques, the governmental forms, the legal regulations, the administrative arrangements, and the economic institutions are binding together peoples of varied cultures and bringing them into closer reciprocal contact. The world today is tending to function as one organism. The outer uniformity has not, however, resulted in an inner unity of mind and spirit. The new nearness into which we are drawn has not meant increasing happiness and diminishing friction, since we are not mentally and spiritually prepared for the meeting. Maxim Gorky relates how, after addressing a peasant audience on the subject of science and the marvels of technical inventions, he was criticized by a peasant spokesman in the following words : "Yes, we are taught to fly in the air like birds, and to swim in the water like the fishes, but how to live on the earth we do not know." Among the races, religions, and nations which live side by side on the small globe, there is not that sense of fellowship necessary for good life. They rather feel themselves to be antagonistic forces. Though humanity has assumed a uniform outer body, it is still without a single animating spirit. The world is not of one mind. … The provincial cultures of the past and the present have not always been loyal to the true interests of the human race. They stood for racial, religious, and political monopolies, for the supremacy of men over women and of the rich over the poor. Before we can build a stable civilization worthy of humanity as a whole, it is necessary that each historical civilization should become conscious of its limitations and it's unworthiness to become the ideal civilization of the world.

If the Upanishads help us to rise above the glamour of the fleshly life, it is because their authors, pure of soul ever striving towards the divine, reveal to us their pictures of the splendours of the unseen. The Upanishads are respected not because they are a part of Sruti or revealed literature and so hold a reserved position, but because they have inspired generations of Indians with vision and strength by their inexhaustible significance and spiritual power. Indian thought has constantly turned to these scriptures for fresh illumination and spiritual recovery or recommencement, and not in vain. The fire still burns bright on their altars. Their light is for the seeing eye and their message is for the seeker after truth.

In the history of thought, creative and critical epochs succeed each other. Periods of rich and glowing faith are followed by those of aridity and artificiality. When we pass from the Rig-Veda to the Yajur and the Sama-Vedas and the Brahmanas, we feel a change in the atmosphere. The freshness and simplicity of the former give place to the coldness and artificiality of the latter. The spirit of religion is in the background, while its forms assume great importance. The need for prayer books is felt. Liturgy is developed. The hymns are taken out of the Rig-Veda and arranged to suit sacrificial necessities. The priest becomes the lord... The religion of the Yajur-Veda is a mechanical sacerdotalism.

You Christians seem to us Hindus rather ordinary people making extraordinary claims... If your Christ has not succeeded in making you better men and women, have we any reason to suppose that he would do more for us, if we became Christians?

If philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience.

Instead of celebrating my birthday, it would be my proud privilege if 5 September is observed as Teachers' Day.

My ambition is to unfold the sources of India in the profound plane of human nature.

Man is a paradoxical being-the constant glory and scandal of this world.

The challenge of Christian critics impelled me to make a study of Hinduism and find out what is living and what is dead in it. My pride as a Hindu, roused by the enterprise and eloquence of Swami Vivekananda, was deeply hurt by the treatment accorded to Hinduism in missionary institutions.

[Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India.... I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.'

The Gita appeals to us not only by its force of thought and majesty of vision, but also by its fervor of devotion and sweetness of spiritual emotion.

Hinduism is not a sect but a fellowship of all who accept the law of right and earnestly seek for the truth.

"Hinduism is therefore not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, but subtly unified mass of spirItual thought and realization. Its tradition of the God ward endeavor of the human spirit has been continuously enlarging through the ages.

Hinduism has come to be a tapestry of the most variegated tissues and almost endless diversity of hues."

In the history of the world, Hinduism is the only religion that exhibits a complete independence and freedom of the human mind, its full confidence in its own powers. Hinduism is freedom, especially the freedom in thinking about God.