"As I walked along the huge, ancient stone of the causeway leading to Angkor Wat, I was forced to look inward and question my own significance in the universe. Everything here, from the huge moat protecting the complex to the giant nagas flanking my path, is designed to make one shrink before the majesty of Vishnu. After passing through a succession of courtyards, each grander and more elaborate than the last, I arrived at an enormous Meru with its five soaring peaks and exquisitely carved walls. What a spectacle this all must have been long ago....Angkor Wat is the representation of the Khmer (Hindu) universe, reflecting a relationship to nature on such a deep level, that it makes modern architecture seem spiritually empty. The soul of the Khmer is alive in these temples and mirrored in the faces of today's Cambodians, the recipients of a rich artistic and spiritual heritage."

Jon Ortner, author of Sacred Places of Asia: Where Every Breath Is A Prayer

"At the sight of this temple, one feels one's spirit crushed, one's imagination surpassed. One looks, one admires, and, seized with respect, one is silent. For where are the words to praise a work of art that may not have its equal anywhere on the globe? ... What genius this Michalangelo of the East had, that he was capable of concaving such a work."

"It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome."

“this architectural work perhaps has not, and perhaps never has had, its equal on the face of the globe.”

Henry Mouhot (1826 -1861), a French naturalist and explorer

"Perhaps no where else in the world, has such an imposing mass of stone been arranged with more sense of art and science...a spark of sheer genius....what grandeur and at the same time what unity..."

"The Khmer took everything from India, from irrigation to astronomy and including Shiva and the rest of Hindu religion...And the Khmer built Angkor. "

"The Khmer civilization was the most important, the most brilliant and original in ancient Indo-China. The brilliant achievements of ancient Cambodia were due primarily to the country’s wealth of natural resources. No other country of the peninsula could boast of such an unbroken extent of fertile and well-watered. Cambodia, being a strictly defined and admirably situated geographical unit, was the cradle of a powerful and gifted race."

"But neither favorable environment nor limitless resources nor years of peace would have sufficed without the spiritual contribution of India."

"India was the spark that fired the blaze."

Bernard Philippe Groslier (1926 -1986), a French conservator and archaeologist

"I've seen the Pyramids in Egypt, the Parthenon in Athens, the Great Wall of China, and the Rome Colleseum, but I think the Temples of Angkor Wat beat them all.  "Think of the world in the 8th to 15th century, when they were burning witches in Britain, and Australia and America hadn't been discovered."

Ken Chamberlain 

Source: www.hinduwisdom.info