Discovering the Spiritual Essence: 21 Quotes on the Sacred Ganga River

21 Quotes on Sacred Ganga River/Image Credit: Baba Steve

The Ganga, revered as the holiest river in Hinduism, holds immense cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance. Its waters are believed to possess purifying properties, and millions of people flock to its banks to partake in religious rituals and ceremonies. Beyond its religious importance, the Ganga sustains countless livelihoods, serving as a vital source of water for agriculture, industry, and domestic use across the Indian subcontinent. However, the river faces numerous challenges, including pollution, over-extraction, and unsustainable development, threatening its health and the well-being of those who depend on it. Preserving the Ganga is not just an environmental imperative but a cultural and spiritual responsibility for all who hold it dear.

We must learn to give, give, and give like the Sun, And like Mother Gangawith no hesitation, no expectation, no vacation and no discrimination.
Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji

The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilization, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga.
Jawaharlal Nehru

The Ganga, they say, is older than the Himalayas.
Ruskin Bond

The Ganga to me is the symbol of India’s memorable past which has been flowing into the present and continues to flow towards the ocean of the future.
Jawaharlal Nehru

Gita and Ganga constitute the essence of Hinduism; one its theory and the other its practice.
Swami Vivekananda

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 Paramhansa

The Ganga, where time stands still and the soul finds solace.
Anonymous

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

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganga – astronomy, astrology, spiritualism, etc. It is very important to note that some 2500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganga to learn geometry.
Francis M. Voltaire

O Ganga, strange are your ways, you fill up the sea but dry up Bhavsagar – the sea of troubles of worldly life.
Ratnakar, Hindi poet

The Ganga, a sacred thread connecting the physical and spiritual realms.
Anonymous

The sacred river Ganges in India is one of the most enduring images of the country.
Daniel Lak

If Ganga lives, India lives.  If Ganga dies, India dies.
Dr. Vandana Shivaji

The land where the Ganges does not flow is likened in a hymn to the sky without the sun, a home without a lamp, a Brahmin without the Veda.
Jean Tavernier, Travels in India

The Ganga, flowing not just through the land but through the soul of India.
Anonymous

The Ganga, where the mundane meets the divine, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Anonymous

Foolish indeed is he who, living on the banks of the Ganga, digs a little well for water. A fool indeed is the man who, coming to a mine of diamonds, seeks for glass beads.
Swami Vivekananda

A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost.
Thomas Moore

I do not know about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and untractable.
T.S. Eliot

The Ganga, where pilgrims seek salvation and poets find inspiration.
Anonymous

The Ganga, a hymn of gratitude sung by the land to the heavens.
Anonymous

All the superior religions had their growth between the Ganga and the Euphrates.
Swami Vivekananda

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