“In my earlier days I had read the biography of Sri Ramakrishna written by Romain Rolland. I had read the talk which Vivekananda had delivered long ago about "My Master". I had visited Sri Ramakrishna's room at Dakshineshwar. I had also seen a Bengali film on his life. But what brought me into an intimate and living contact with this great mystic and bhakta and shakta and advaitin, was his Kathamrita. He had not used a single abstraction nor discussed any of the problems which pass as philosophy. His talks embodied expressions of a concrete consciousness which had dropped every trace of the dirt and dross and inertia which characterise what is known as normal human consciousness. The metaphors which sprang spontaneously from this purified consciousness were matchless in their aptness and illumined in a few words the knotted problems which many voluminous works had failed to solve. I was now having my first intimations of immortality towards which Kabir and Nanak and Sri Garibdas had inclined me earlier.”

— Sita Ram Goel

How I became a Hindu (1982)

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Sita Ram Goel 192

Indian activist 1921–2003

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

When Sharat Chandra Chakrabarty, a disciple fo Vivekananda asked Adbhutananda for permission to write his biography.
Source: God Lived with Them, p.395

“After reading the script, I had a strange feeling that I had Umrao in me. And the film created history.… I gave a performance which is one of my personal favourites.”

Rekha (1954) Indian film actress

About her acting in Umroa Jan quoted in Ever gorgeous, 16 October 2010, 7 December 2013, The Hindu http://www.hindu.com/mp/2010/10/16/stories/2010101650330700.htm,
Ever gorgeous

“For many years I did not dare look into a Latin author or at anything which evoked an image of Italy. If this happened by chance, I suffered agonies. Herder often used to say mockingly that I had learned all my Latin from Spinoza, for that was the only Latin book he had ever seen me reading. He did not realize how carefully I had to guard myself against the classics, and that it was sheer anxiety which drove me to take refuge in the abstractions of Spinoza.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Original in German: Schon einige Jahre her durft' ich keinen lateinischen Autor ansehen, nichts betrachten, was mir ein Bild Italiens erneute. Geschah es zufällig, so erduldete ich die entsetzlichsten Schmerzen. Herder spottete oft über mich, daß ich all mein Latein aus dem Spinoza lerne, denn er hatte bemerkt, daß dies das einzige lateinische Buch war, das ich las; er wußte aber nicht, wie sehr ich mich vor den Alten hüten mußte, wie ich mich in jene abstrusen Allgemeinheiten nur ängstlich flüchtete.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, 1786–88. Translated from the German by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)
G - L, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume III, chapter VI: "Miscellanea", page 252 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=264&itemID=F1452.3&viewtype=image; letter to William Ogle (22 February 1882)
Ogle had translated Aristotle's Parts of Animals and sent Darwin a copy.
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

“Another great writer who led me on It this stage was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I had read all his novels but had never been able to understand why he had been honoured as a rishi. I myself was a novelist and had already written several humane stories. I thought that a novelist dealt with the dimensions of human character and mapped the heights it could scale and the depths to which it could sink. Why should we foist the title of a rishi on this poor fellow? That way rishis will be available a dime a dozen. My doubts about Bankim Chandra being a rishi were removed when I read the second volume of his Collected Works in Bengali. His insights into the innermost core of Hindu culture were a revelation. His Ramayaner Alochona made me see the monstrosities of modern Indology, more than ever before. I immediately translated this masterpiece into Hindi.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

“It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country but didn't know the language, but had read enough and had a passionate interest, and was eager to live there, I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the language. [reacting on Pollock's 'Black and White' paintings show in 1951; Frankenthaler saw his painting art then for the first time in her life]”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Quote from Abstract Expressionism, Barbara Hess, New York, Abrams, 1971, p. 29
1970s - 1980s

“Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" in The Forerunner (October 1913).

“I listened while he thought aloud and had almost forgotten my Machiavellian combination, so keen was my relish of the joyous intimacy of this communion with a mind I had passionately loved in his works. He was the first of the great writers of our day whom I had thus approached on something like terms of intimacy. As we talked I observed the strange similarity between his spoken and his written words. I admired the charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of imagination, his superabundant intelligence, the liveliness of his impressions and his total absence of arrogance and of pose.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

The Age for Love

“What a weird experience I had had! At no time had I felt at home in the Communist party. I had always felt that the possibility was there, but always I was not quite sure of the motives of the people with whom I worked and they never seemed quite sure of mine. My comrades had known me, my family, my friends; they, God knows, had known my aching poverty. But they had never been able to conquer their fear of the individual way in which I acted and lived, an individuality which life had seared into my blood and bones.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

“I was reading the Book of Job. / People I knew came and went, / I read their book, / the seasons turned away, / I had been reading for a long time. / I was quiet. Not a single leaf to be seen. / I looked up: it had gone dark on me, / that star / in the middle of the sentence: // Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

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