Ganges Quotes

It was Heraclitus, of course, who came up with the formulation that we are never able to step into the same river twice. ... The obverse of Heraclitus's maxim may be that one is never able to step out of the river the same, twice. A neuron in the brain is altered with every experience. The self, if it exists, must be a constantly evolving thing. Those coming to the banks of the Ganges or Jordan to immerse themselves do not expect to leave the same as they arrive. ~ James Attlee

And I shall see it again... in dreams, when I sleep by the Ganges; and again, in a more remote hour - when another slumber overcomes me, on the shore of a darker stream! ~ Charlotte Bronte

The Lover Reconsiders

Wait...
You.
Come hither come closer come here,
shrug and wriggle your way out of those clothes,
shed them like baby teeth,
like snakeskin,
like feathers from the molt of a phoenix
come here
let me hold you let my arms draw you closer
come hither let me be suffused with your scent come here now.

I want to kiss you, I want to kiss you,
I want to kiss my way down your body and back up again
give me your guided tour, teach me of your landmarks
those hips of yours are strangers to my touch but I mean to make their acquaintance
so yes there here I want to kiss you

I want to learn what you whisper when you kiss with your heart's shutters open
I want to nip at your lower lip
I want the rush of blood to make that mouth tingle
I want to talk in quiet tones to all of you
come hither come closer come here

Now, bolt the door, now, unplug the phone,
now warn the neighbors to ignore the racket
I do not want fifteen minutes of your time
I want the whole fucking night.
Now let me see the smile you save for special occasions

Now don't pick a favorite position pick five
Now I want to bathe myself in you
Now now now like the Ganges,
like the Red Sea, like the Amazon
I want to follow you down to your ocean

Now I want to savor you, lover, come to me
make ti ~ Patrick Honovich

Even if you have mountains of jewels and as many servants as there are grains of sand along the Ganges, you see them when your eyes are open. But what about when your eyes are shut?You should realize then that everything you see is like a dream or illusion. ~ Bodhidharma

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.
Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better. ~ Rory Stewart

So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life. ~ E. M. Forster

What I mean is,' continued Amit, 'it sprouts, and grows, and spreads, and drops down branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. Sometimes branches die. Sometimes the main trunk dies, and the structure is held up by the supporting trunks. When you go to the Botanical Garden you'll see what I mean. It has its own life - but so do the snakes and birds and bees and lizards and termites that live in it and on it and off it. But then it's also like the Ganges in its upper, middle and lower courses - including its delta - of course. ~ Vikram Seth

The waves belong to the Ganges, not the Ganges to the waves. A man cannot realize God unless he gets rid of all such egotistic ideas as "I am such an important man" or "I am so and so". Level the mound of "I" to the ground by dissolving it with tears of devotion. ~ Ramakrishna

Mother Ganges teaches us that if we want to attain the sea of our aspiration, we must persevere in our goal and never be discouraged by the inevitable obstacles that come on our path. ~ Radhanath Swami

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A poet is a poet, whether he rides in a Ford or on a donkey; a sage is a sage, whether he plays golf in New Jersey or bathes in the Ganges, or prays in the desert; and a fool is a fool, whether he be a maharaja or a president of a post-war republic. ~ Ameen Rihani

In Delhi we drove past dozens of Jain Sādhu holy men in saffron-coloured clothing which symbolises their saṃnyāsa (the ashrama life stage of renunciation). The Sādhu are respected for their holiness and feared for their curses, and 2000 years ago military generals laid down arms rather than wage war against a city protected by the Sādhu. In ancient Vedic verses they were called the long-haired ones and even today they have long stringy locks of hair that resemble dreadlocks, and many smoke sacred chillums of hashish all day long. They survive off alms or the goodness of others, often eating food provided only by prostitutes or low-ranking 'sweeper' caste people. The ones we saw, we were told, had walked 838km from the holy Ganges River carrying a spoonful of holy water. And it is with profound sadness that we missed the photographic opportunity. ~ Karl Wiggins

In the spring of 1968, The Beatles and I were invited by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to travel to Riskikesh, India. Riskikesh has been an important spiritual place to many millions of people over the years. It is situated where the Ganges River flows out of the Himalayas, and to be in that atmosphere was something incredibly special. ~ Mike Love

Environment is a sculptor - a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

I will lay my bones by the Ganges that India might know there is one who cares. ~ Alexander Duff

If Ganges is the mother, Himalayas is the father. One nurtures and nourishes, the other provides and protects. ~ Vinita Kinra

Yet, unbeknownst to him, it had been kept alive - and it was only now, in listening to Deet's songs, that he recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music: he had always had a great love of dadras, chaitis, barahmasas, horis, kajris - songs such as Deeti was singing. Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation - of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home. ~ Amitav Ghosh

You can walk with the Shintoist through his sacred groves, or chant an affirmation with the Hindu on the banks of the Ganges ... and still be a student of Unity ... As the Christ becomes greater to you in Unity, the Buddha also becomes greater, and the greater the Buddha becomes, the greater the Christ becomes. ~ James Marcus Bach

A far cicada rings high and clear over the river's heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth's mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Ashima feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her husband. She feels overwhelmed by the thought of the move she is about to make, to the city that was once home and is now in its own way foreign. She feels both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live, for something tells her she will not go quickly as her husband did. For thirty-three years she missed her life in India. Now she will miss her job at the library, the women with whom she's worked... She will miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband. Though his ashes have been scattered into the Ganges, it is here, in this house and in this town, that he will continue to dwell in her mind. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Sir Pherozeshah had seemed to me like the Himalaya, the Lokamanya like the ocean. But Gokhale was as the Ganges. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

All beautiful forms of this world are in the process of transformation. Nothing is stable. With every moment, our reality is changing. Mother Ganges, like nature, is constant, but no manifestation of hers remains. Likewise, all that we hold dear in this world is imperceptibly vanishing. We cannot cling to anything. But if we can appreciate the beauty of the underlying current of truth, we can enjoy a reality deeper than the fickle waves of joy and sorrow. ~ Radhanath Swami

52
The matter is not finished by going to Mecca, so long as you do not finish off the self from your heart. Sins are not shed by going to the Ganges, even though you immerse yourself hundreds of times. The matter is not finished off by going to Gaya, no matter how many offerings you make to the dead. Bullhe Shah, the matter is finished when the ego is destroyed.

53
If I search for you for you inside, then I think you are confined. If I search for you outside, then who is contained within me? You are everything, you are in everything, you are known to be free from everything. You are me and I am you, so who is poor Bullha?

54
You remain awake at night and perform your devotions. Also awake at night are dogs, better than you. They bark and in no way can they be stopped. They go and sleep on the dung heap, better than you. They do not leave their master's door, even if they get beaten with slippers, better than you. Bullhe Shah, buy yourself something for the journey, or else the game will be won by the dogs, better than you. ~ Bulleh Shah

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets - Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included - breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. ...
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?
...
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
...
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It's always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there's too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I st ~ Aidan Chambers

Buddha said, "Forgive? But I am not the same man to whom you did it. The Ganges goes on flowing, it is never the same Ganges again. Every man is a river. The man you spit upon is no longer here. I look just like him, but I am not the same, much has happened in these twenty-four hours! The river has flowed so much. So I cannot forgive you because I have no grudge against you."

"And you also are new. I can see you are not the same man who came yesterday because that man was angry and he spit, whereas you are bowing at my feet, touching my feet. How can you be the same man? You are not the same man, so let us forget about it. Those two people, the man who spit and the man on whom he spit, both are no more. Come closer. Let us talk of something else. ~ Gautama Buddha

The world is not likely to tire of an amusement which never repeats itself, of a game which today presents features as novel and charms as fresh as those with which it delighted, in the morning of history, the dwellers on the banks of the Ganges and Indus. ~ Willard Fiske

The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva's hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India we call immemorial came into being. But India is really far older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea. They are older than anything in the world. No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless aeons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom. If flesh of the sun's flesh is to be touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills. ~ E.M. Forster

We cannot see Beauty till we let go our hold of it. It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander - this is untrue when stated in dry prose - oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotrie? ~ Rabindranath Tagore

There was once a Hindu sage, who sat down on the banks of the Ganges and thought for seventy years about the millennium. Just as he arrived at the solution and was putting it into verse, a mosquito stung him and he forgot it again at once. ~ Don Marquis

A bath in Ganges undoubtedly absolves one of all sins; but what does that avail? They say that the sins perch on trees along the banks of the Ganges. No sooner does the man come back from the holy waters that the old sins jump on his shoulders from the trees. The same old sins take possession of him again. He is hardly out of the waters before they fall upon him. ~ Ramakrishna

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.. ~ Voltaire

Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here. ~ Voltaire

Allahabad, that is, the City of God, one of the most venerated in India, being built at the junction of the two sacred rivers, Ganges and Jumna, the waters of which attract pilgrims from every part of the peninsula. The Ganges, according to the legends of the Ramayana, rises in heaven, whence, owing to Brahma's agency, it descends to the earth. ~ Jules Verne

Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges ... ? ~ Jules Michelet