Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan quotes

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian philosopher and statesman who served as the second President of India. Renowned for his interpretations of Indian philosophy for the Western world, he promoted understanding between cultures. He made significant contributions to education and is celebrated annually on Teacher's Day in India. Here are 99 of his quotes:

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

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

[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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The institution of caste illustrates the spirit of comprehensive synthesis characteristic of the Hindu mind with its faith in the collaboration of races and the co-operation of cultures. Paradoxical as it may seem, the system of caste is the outcome of tolerance and trust.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

If experience is the soul of religion, expression is the body through which it fulfills its destiny. We have the spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Hindu maxim that theory, speculations, [and] dogma change from time to time as the facts become better understood.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Religion is a kind of life or experience.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

[The moral hero is] fighting for the reshaping of his own society on sounder lines [his] behavior might offend the sense of decorum of the cautious conventionalist.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The experience or the vision is the artist's counterpart to the scientific discovery of a principle or law. What the scientist does when he discovers a new law is to give a new ordering to observed facts. The artist is engaged in a similar task. He gives new meaning to our experience and organizes it in a different way due to his perception of subtler qualities in reality.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Even in the act of composition, the poet is in a state in which the reflective elements are subordinated to the intuitive. The vision, however, is not operative for so long as it continues, its very stress acts as a check on expression.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The Vedanta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

We can see objects without the medium of the senses and discern relations spontaneously without building them up laboriously. In other words, we can discern every kind of reality directly.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Poets and prophets do not go into committees.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The marginalization of intuition and the abandonment of the experimental attitude in matters of religion has lead Christianity to dogmatic stasis. It is an unfortunate legacy of the course which Christian theology has followed in Europe that faith has come to connote a mechanical adherence to authority. If we take faith in the proper sense of truth or spiritual conviction, religion is faith or intuition.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan