"Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them."
— Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)

"So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Als it is hard for America to fight wars in the name of freedom, if those people themselves choose for nonfreedom. Can America and England save India from communism, if they vote communist themselves."
— Oswald Mosley (Ich glaube an Europa: Ein Weg aus der Krise, eine Einführung in das europäische Denken)

"India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination."
— Thrity Umrigar (The Weight of Heaven: A Novel)

""Friendship if something that gets harder to understand every damn year of my life. Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passed." "
— Karla - Shantaram

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"His adventures in India, that great and terrible land where distended men learn ways of breathing for which Western air will not suffice, these he never told."
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (Le dessous de cartes d'une partie de whist)

"Слънцето трябва да залезе и да се издигне месецът, докато Кайро се отвори като мида и се разкире красотата му в силуетите."
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"Някои палми накланят глави сред вятъра, нощта е чудна във всеки отрязък, благодарение на собствените и на чуждите духове,а той, самотният пътешественик, не може да си представи мръсния, припрян, пронизителен и потискащ живот през деня."
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"Понякога напращелият град се уригваше. Всичко миришеше на разложения от стомашни сокове. Накрая на улицата лежеше полусмялно слепоочие, което щеше скоро да се разтече. Една лъжица загребваше от месестата част на презряла папая, на връщане от пазара петите не излъхваха пот,а кориандър. Той не знаеше какво го отвращаваше повече, морският бриз, по време на отлива, носещ гнилия дъх на водорасли и плажни медузи, или уханията на мюсюлманската закуска от вътрешности на коза, запържвани върху малки печки. Пътеката на човечеството бе постлана с коварни изкушения."
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"Най-непоносими са шумовете: гукащите гълъби в отворения шкаф, дрезгавогласни и свадливи от любовно усърдие, огромните котки, които минават през скелето на покрива и ридаят от ненаситна разгоненост."
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"Те рецитираха първата сура, фатихах, насочили длани към небето, сякаш искаха да уловят някакво благословение, което слизаше от небето върху кораба."
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"Ричард Франсис Бъртън умря рано сутринта, когато нишките бяло и черно бяха неразличими. Над главата му висеше една персийска калиграфия на която пишеше:
И това ще отмине."
— Ilija Trojanow (Der Weltensammler.)

"Kemarahan sering berakhir dengan kekejaman."
— Peribahasa India

""how many cares one loses becomes not something, but someone.""
— -Coco Chanel

""Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam. "
— Prem Kishore (India: An Illustrated History)

"When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism."
— Prem Kishore (India: An Illustrated History)

"Krishna taught in the Bhadavad Gita: ‘karmanyeva-adhikaraste ma phalesu kadachana’, which means, ‘Be active, never be inactive, and don’t react to the outcome of the work.’"
— (Bhagavad Gita: 2.47)

"And he felt dubious and discontented suddenly, and wondered whether he was really and truly successful as a human being."
— E.M. Forster

"Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep--all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with."
— Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)

"Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, ‘’does’’ have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—"we" entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now."
— Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)

"If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!"
— Romaine Rolland

"Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue."
— Pavan K. Varma (Being Indian)

"Say not that it is impossible. It will take you a long time, but you shall surely master it. Success will take you by surprise one day; it comes suddenly. "
— Bramasuganandah

"How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country."
— Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)

"Concerning Concealment as a symptom of love for Krsna:

"It has been stated, 'although Srimati Radharani developed a deep loving affection for Krsna, She hid Her attitude in the core of Her heart so that others could not detect Her actual condition.'
- Nectar of Devotion, chapter 30"
— A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

"Adakah yang lebih kejam dari angkara murka yang merusakkan senyum pada wajah dan kasih dalam hati?
Kalau orang ingin benar-benar menjaga dirinya, hendaknya ia berhati-hati terhadap angkara murka yang bisa memusnahkan dirinya.
Api kemarahan membakar semua yang mendekat, termasuk ikatan persahabatan yang menyenangkan."
— Kebijaksanaan India Kuno