Many famous and successful people, materially speaking, down through history have read and admired Bhagavad Gita. Unfortunately, they didn’t have access to Bhagavad Gita As It Is, by Srila Prabhupada, so whether they achieved ultimate success, which means liberation from the material world, is doubtful. They most definitely had to go through some more lives to achieve that.
"The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad Gita"
~
Henry David Thoreau
"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."
~
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad Geeta and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meanings from it every day."
~
Mahatma Gandhi
"The marvel of the Bhagavad Geeta is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion."
~
Herman Hesse
"The Bhagavad Geeta is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity."
~
Aldous Huxley
"The idea that man is like unto an inverted tree seems to have been current in by gone ages. The link with Vedic conceptions is provided by Plato in his Timaeus in which it states 'behold we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant.' This correlation can be discerned by what Krishna expresses in chapter 15 of Bhagavad Geeta."
~
Carl Jung
"The Bhagavad Geeta has a profound influence on the spirit of mankind by its devotion to God which is manifested by actions."
~
Dr. Albert Schweitzer
"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Geeta, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."
~
Henry David Thoreau
"The religion and philosophy of the Hebrews are those of a wilder and ruder tribe, wanting the civility and intellectual refinements and subtlety of Vedic culture."
~
Henry David Thoreau
"In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life -- it will be the solace of my death."
~
Arthur Schopenhauer
"The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue ... perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show."
~
Wilhelm von Humboldt
"The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive, when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrances."
~
Lord Warren Hastings
"So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
"Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined."
~
Mark Twain
"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Hindu brown for the Christian riles and the Hindu smiles and weareth the Christian down; and the end of the fight is a tombstone while with the name of the late deceased and the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the east".
~
Rudyard Kipling to Fundamental Christian Missionaries