"The Life of Sankara makes a strong impression of contraries. He is a philospher and a poet a savant and a saint a mystic and a religious reformer. Such diverse gifts did he possess that different images present themselves if we try to recall his personality. One sees him in youth on fire with intellectual ambition a stiff and intrepid debator; another regards him as a shrewd political genius (rather a patriot) attempting to impress on the people a sense of unity; for a third he is a calm philosopher engaged in the single effort to expose the contradictions of life and thought with an unmatched incisiveness; for a fourth who declares that we are all greater than we know. There have been a few minds more universal than his" - Swami Tapasyananda