Renowned Thinkers Who Appreciated the Vedic Literatures

Many of the worlds greatest thinkers admired the Vedas as great repositories of advanced knowledge and high thinking


Arthur Schopenhauer, the famed German philosopher and writer, wrote that: I "...encounter [in the Vedas] deep, original, lofty thoughts... suffused with a high and holy seriousness."

The well-known early American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, read the Vedas daily. Emerson wrote: "I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavat-Gita"

Henry David Thoreau said: "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita... in comparison with which... our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial."

So great were Emerson and Thoreau's appreciation of Vedantic literatures that they became known as the American transcendentalists. Their writings contain many thoughts from Vedic Philosophy.

Other famous personalities who spoke of the greatness of the Vedas were: Alfred North Whitehead (British mathematician, logician and philosopher), who stated that: "Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived."

Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the principle developer of the atomic bomb, stated that "The Vedas are the greatest privilege of this century." During the explosion of the first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer quoted several Bhagavad-gita verses from the 11th chapter, such as: "Death I am, cause of destruction of the worlds..."

When Oppenheimer was asked if this is the first nuclear explosion, he significantly replied: "Yes, in modern times," implying that ancient nuclear explosions may have previously occurred.


Lin Yutang, Chinese scholar and author, wrote that: "India was China's teacher in trigonometry, quadratic equations, grammar, phonetics... " and so forth.

Francois Voltaire stated: "... everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges."

French astronomer Jean-Claude Bailly corroborated the antiquity and accuracy of the Vedic astronomical measurements as "more ancient than those of the Greeks or Egyptians." And that, "the movements of the stars calculated 4,500 years ago, does not differ by a minute from the tables of today."


From these statements we see that many renowned intellectuals believed that the Vedas provided the origin of scientific thought.