Presidents Of India

"Psychic experiences are a state of consciousness beyond the understanding of the normal, and the supernormal is traced to the supernatural."

"Creative insight is not the final link in a chain of reasoning. If it were that, it would not strike us as inspired in its origin. Intuition is not the end, but part of an ever-developing and ever-dynamic process of realization. There is continual system of “checks and balances” between intuition and the logical method of discursive reasoning. Cognitive intuitions are not substitutes for thought, they are challenges to intelligence. Mere intuitions are blind while intellectual work is empty. All processes are partly intuitive and partly intellectual. There is no gulf between the two."

"The presentation of facts in logical form contributes to a confusion between discovery and proof. If the process of discovery were mere synthesis, any mechanical manipulator of prior partial concepts would have reached the insight and it would not have taken a genius to arrive at it."

"Knowledge when acquired must be thrown into logical form and we are obliged to adopt the language of logic since only logic has a communicable language."

"The readjustment [of previously known facts] is so easy that when the insight is attained it escapes notice and we imagine that the process of discovery is only rational synthesis."

"The insight does not arise if we are not familiar with the facts of the case... The successful practice of intuition requires previous study and assimilation of a multitude of facts and laws. We may take it that great intuitions arise out of a matrix of rationality."

"The art of discovery is confused with the logic of proof and an artificial simplification of the deeper movements of thought results. We forget that we invent by intuition though we prove by logic."

"In any concrete act of thinking the mind’s active experience is both intuitive and intellectual."

"Logical knowledge is indirect and symbolic in its character. It helps us to handle and control the object and its workings."

"Intuitions are convictions arising out of a fullness of life in a spontaneous way, more akin to sense than to imagination or intellect and more inevitable than either."

"Intuition is a distinct form of experience. Intuition is of a self-certifying character (svatassiddha). It is sufficient and complete. It is self-established (svatasiddha), self-evidencing (svāsaṃvedya), and self-luminous (svayam-prakāsa). Intuition entails pure comprehension, entire significance, complete validity. It is both truth-filled and truth-bearing Intuition is its own cause and its own explanation. It is sovereign. Intuition is a positive feeling of calm and confidence, joy and strength. Intuition is profoundly satisfying . It is peace, power and joy."

"Wars of religion which are the outcome of fanaticism that prompts and justifies the extermination of aliens of different creeds were practically unknown in Hindu India."

"The intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. The worshippers of the one jealous God are egged on to aggressive wars against people of alien cults. They invoke divine sanction for the cruelties inflicted on the conquered. The spirit of old Israel is inherited by Christianity and Islam."

"The disciples surrounded with cheap marvels and wonders the lonely figure of that serene Soul, simple and austere in his yellow robes, walking with bared feet and bowed head towards Benares."

"The violent extermination of Buddhism in India is legendary. Buddhism grew weaker as it spread wider. The spirit of compromise which breathed in the Xllth Edict of Ashoka that there should be no praising of one's sect and decrying of other sects but on the contrary a rendering of honour to other sects for whatever cause honour may be due to them was its strength and weakness. It accommodated too much. Divinities and heavens slipped into Buddhism from other creeds with the spread of the religion."

"We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant. It is reason that helps us to reject what is falsely taught and believed about God, that He is a detective officer or a capricious despot or a glorified schoolmaster. It is essential that we should subject religious beliefs to the scrutiny of reason."

"We become more religious in proportion to our readiness to doubt and not our willingness to believe."

"To be ignorant is not the special prerogative of man; to know that he is ignorant is his special privilege."

"We invent by intuition, though we prove by logic."

"We are grown-up infants, and God is a sort of 'wet nurse' to humanity."

"A stone is not self any more than a self is a stone."

"Poets and prophets do not go into committees."

"It is true that internationalism is growing. Economists warn us that war does not pay. It is bad business. Some of us are growing pacifist by policy, though not by conviction. The spirit of internationalism is but skin-deep. Except a small minority in each country who remained heroically faithful to its principles, the rest sacrificed their humanity at the altar of their country in the last war. Even the dignitaries of the Church proved themselves to be of the school of Mephistopheles, "who built God a church and laughed his word to scorn." Churches were turned into recruiting offices. The fanatic appeals of all sides to the Almighty must have confused God himself, and the frame of mind in which the onlookers were is well expressed in J. C. Squire's quatrain : —"

"As an Advaitin, he embraced a metaphysical idealism. But his idealism was such that it recognized the reality and diversity of the world of experience (prakṛti) while at the same time preserving the notion of a wholly transcendent Absolute (Brahman), an Absolute that is identical to the self (Atman). While the world of experience and of everyday things is certainly not ultimate reality as it is subject to change and is characterized by finitude and multiplicity, it nonetheless has its origin and support in the Absolute (Brahman) which is free from all limits, diversity, and distinctions (nirguna). Brahman is the source of the world and its manifestations, but these modes do not affect the integrity of Brahman."

"He was appointed by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as Indian Ambassador to Moscow, a post he held until 1952. It provided him the opportunity to put into practice his own philosophical-political ideals came with his election to the Raja Sabha, in which he served as India’s Vice-President (1952-1962) and later as President (1962-1967)."

"During the 1930s and 1940s the issues of education and nationalism came together for him, and his vision was of an autonomous India. He envisioned an India built and guided by those who were truly educated, by those who had a personal vision of and commitment to raising Indian self-consciousness."

"[He] was knighted in 1931, the same year he took up his administrative post as Vice Chancellor at the newly founded, Andhra University at Waltair, served there for five years as Vice Chancellor. In 1936, not only did the university in Calcutta affirm his position in perpetuity but Oxford University appointed him to the H.N. Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics. In late 1939, he took up his second Vice Chancellorship at Benares Hindu University (BHU), and served there during the course of the second world war until mid-January 1948, two weeks before Gandhi’s assassination in New Delhi."

"While Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) as he defined it best exemplified his position, he claimed that the genuine philosophical, theological, and literary traditions in India and the West supported his position."

"In his mind, he had identified the “religious” problem, reviewed the alternatives, and posited a solution - An unreflective dogmatism could not be remedied by escaping from “experiential religion” which is the true basis of all religions."

"Throughout the 1920s, his reputation as a scholar continued to grow both in India and abroad. He was invited to Oxford to give the 1926 Upton Lectures, published in 1927 as "The Hindu View of Life", and in 1929 he delivered the Hibbert Lectures, later published under the title "An Idealist View of Life". His most sustained, non-commentarial work, "An Idealist View of Life", is frequently seen as a mature work and has undoubtedly received the bulk of scholarly attention to him."

"He was for the first time out of his South Indian element — geographically, culturally, and linguistically when he took up the Calcutta and the George V Chair (1921-1931) in Philosophy at Calcutta University."

"Tagore was his most influential Indian mentor. Tagore’s poetry and prose resonated with him. He appreciated Tagore’s emphasis on aesthetics as well as his appeal to intuition. From 1914 on, both of these notions — aesthetics and intuition — begin to find their place in his own interpretations of experience, the epistemological category for his philosophical and religious proclivities...he would repeatedly appeal to Tagore’s writing to support his own philosophical ideals."

"[He] was no longer content simply to define and defend Vedanta. Instead, he sought to confront directly not only Vedanta’s Western competitors, but what he saw as the Western philosophical enterprise and the Western ethos in general."

"Between 1914 and 1920, he continued to publish. He authored eighteen articles, ten of which were published in prominent Western journals such as The International Journal of Ethics, The Monist, and Mind. Throughout these articles, he took it upon himself to refine and expand upon his interpretation of Hinduism."

"In 1904, he entered Madras Christian College was trained in European philosophy was introduced to the philosophies of Berkeley, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, J.S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Fichte, Hegel, Aristotle, and Plato among others. He was also introduced to the philosophical methods and theological views of his MA supervisor and most influential non-Indian mentor, Professor A.G. Hogg."

"What Vivekananda, Savarkar, and Theosophy did bring to him was a sense of cultural self-confidence and self-reliance."

"He inherited from his upbringing a tacit acceptance of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedanta and an awareness of the centrality of devotional practices associated with the smarta tradition."

"He attended Elizabeth Rodman Voorhees College in Vellore, a school run by the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church in America where he was introduced to the Dutch Reform Theology, which emphasized a righteous God, unconditional grace, and election, and which criticized Hinduism as intellectually incoherent and ethically unsound. This is where he encountered what would have appeared to him as crippling assaults on his Hindu sensibilities. He also would have witnessed the positive contributions of the social programs undertaken by the Mission in the name of propagation of the Christian gospel."

"The theology taught in the missionary school may have found resonance with the highly devotional activities connected with the nearby Tirumala temple, activities that he undoubtedly would have witnessed taking place outside the school. The shared emphasis on personal religious experience may have suggested to him a common link between the religion of the missionaries and the religion practiced at the nearby Tirumala temple."

"The implicit acceptance of Śaṅkara’s Advaita by the smarta tradition is good evidence to suggest that an advaitic framework was an important, though latent, feature of his early philosophical and religious sensibilities."

"[He] has been held in academic circles as a representative of Hinduism to the West. His lengthy writing career and his many published works have been influential in shaping the West’s understanding of Hinduism, India, and the East."

"As an academic, philosopher, and statesman, he was one of the most recognized and influential Indian thinkers in academic circles in the 20th century. Throughout his life and extensive writing career, he sought to define, defend, and promulgate his religion, a religion he variously identified as Hinduism, Vedanta, and the religion of the Spirit."

"Religion to him is essentially a concern of the inner self securing a spiritual certainty which lifts life above meaningless existence and dull despair, giving worth to values, meaning to life, confidence to adventure. He was impatient of the sorry scheme of things of the present day when the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. He thought of a day when the strong cease to be greedy and the weak learn to be bold. For things were never settled quite until they were settled right."

"In Indian Philosophy he not only laid a stone foundation surely and truly but also built an edifice that shall outlast any philosophic storm. It was not so much a history as an exposition, and the exposition was vivid, vital and gripping. It was full of feeling. It made an epoch by itself. It was the two volumes of Indian Philosophy in the "Library of Philosophy" that showed that there was hardly any height of spiritual insight or rational philosophy attained in the world that has not its parallel in the vast stretch he dealt with that lies between the early sages and the modern Naiyaikas [leaders]."

"In Kalki, or the Future of Civilization, he deals with the fact that although science has helped us to build up our outer life, we are not above the level of past generations in ethical and spiritual life. If anything, we have declined. Our natures are becoming mechanized. Void within, we are being reduced to mere members of a mob. There is a tendency to seek salvation in herds. For a complete human being we require the cultivation of the grace and joy of souls overflowing in love and devotion and the free service of a regenerated humanity."

"He was a philosophicalbilinguist who acted as the liaison officer of Hinduism. He was equally well-versed in Western philosophical thought and in Eastern. And he expounded the East to the West and the Occident to the Orient. But it was no mere exposition — originality in philosophy, as in 'poetry, consists not in the novelty of the tale or the light and shade distributed over the canvas but the depth and subtlety made to dominate the details. In this sense, he was original in his exposition as a poet or a painter in expression. He had found a new technique in the presentation of Oriental philosophy. He presented ultimate truths of religion in the psychological idiom of this age."

"He was not dull. A tall lanky virile Andhra, well-dressed and spic and span, he stood upright with an intense vitality filling his eyes welled with visions. His speech was pithy, — polished and precise. He studied philosophy as a scientist — not as a moralist."

"The tradition of the Rishi is alive in India even today. He was the twentieth century equivalent of the ancient Hindu Rishi; the inspired philosopher at whose feet the tempests lose their guile. When he first lit the lamp of Indian philosophy in the West it made the European savants blink. It also illumined his own face to the world. With him philosophy was not a bare catalogue of fatiguing facts and tiring theories of dead authors and their musty old writings but a fascinating story that grips the mind and enthrals the imagination. This modern Recording Rishi of Indian philosophy, unlike other historians, used his scholarship to wrest from philosophical watch-words the thoughts embedded in them and reset them like jewels in epigrams giving out a strange new brilliance."

"To live only for some unknown future is superficial. It is like climbing a mountain to reach the peak without experiencing its sides. The sides of the mountain sustain life, not the peak. This is where things grow, experience gained, and technologies are mastered. The importance of peak lies only in the fact that it defines the sides. So I went on towards the top, but always experiencing the sides. I had a long way to go but I was in no hurry. I went in little steps—just one step after another—but each step towards the top."

"Happiness, satisfaction, and success in life depend on making the right choices, the winning choices. There are forces in life working for you and against you. One must distinguish the beneficial forces from the malevolent ones and choose correctly between them."