35 quotes
As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it dwindles hour by hour. But friendship with the good increases, like the evening shadows, till the sun of life sets.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
The greatest cosmopolites are generally the neediest beggars, and they who embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part, love nothing but their narrow self.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Man is a central creature between the animals, that is to say, the most perfect form, which unites the traits of all in the most complete epitome.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Thus we build on the ice, thus we write on the waves of the sea; the waves roaring pass away, the ice melts, and away goes our palace, like our thoughts.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Whoever perseveres will be crowned.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
The working of revolutions misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)
Herder objected that "the pains that have been taken, to make of all the people of the earth, according to this genealogy, descendants of the Hebrew, and half-brothers of the Jews, are contrary not only to chronology and universal history but to the true point of view of the narrative itself." As far as he was concerned, "the central point of the largest quarter of the Globe, the primitive mountains of Asia, prepared the first abode of the human race."
Attributed
The Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity. They do not with pleasure offend anything that lives; they honor that which gives life and nourish themselves with the most innocent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses . . . Moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts and even their endurance under the most extreme yoke of humanity.
Attributed
Let us abandon these regions where our predecessors, like Buet, Buxtorf or Bochart, sought the beginnings of the world! These corners of Arabia and Judaea, these basins of the Nile and the Euphrates, these coasts of Phoenicia and Damascus, where the human race might have come into existence like mice or rats; all these must be left behind! Let us scale the mountain laboriously to the summit of Asia. Where will this lead us? The horizons swing back and forth. History, which has dated all things from that beginning, will have another beginning and another end.
Attributed
The Bramins have formed their people to such a degree of gentleness, courtesy, temperance and chastity, or at least have so confirmed them in these virtues, that Europeans frequently appear, on comparison with them, as beastly, drunken or mad. In their air and language they are unconstrainedly elegant; in their behaviour, friendly; in their persons, clean; in their way of life, simple and harmless ... they are not destitute of knowledge, still less of quiet industry or nicely imitative art; even the lowest castes learn reading, writing and arithmetic. . . .
Attributed
It is therefore indisputable, that the Brahman had educated their people towards a certain gentleness, moderation and purity, or, at the very least, had strengthened them in these virtues, so that, conversely, to them the Europeans often appeared dirty, drunken and raving. Their bearing and language are spontaneous and graceful, their relations are peaceful, their bodies are clean, and their way of life is simple and harmless. Children are raised in a mild manner, yet they nevertheless are not lacking in knowledge, nor even less in quiet industry and the fine, though imitative, arts; even the lowest tribes learn to read, write and count. Therefore, since the Brahman were for millennia the educators of the youth, they have provided an unequivocal service to humanity.
Attributed
You see, my friend, how holy these books are to me, and how much I (according to Voltaire’s ridicule) am a Jew, when | read them: for should we not be Greeks and Romans, when we read [the works of] Greeks and Romans? Every book must be read in its own spirit, and so too the book of books, the Bible; and since this one contains, from the beginning to the end, the revealed spirit of God... we cannot do anything more perverse than to read God’s texts with the spirit of Satan, that is, to embellish the oldest wisdom by invoking the most recent stupidities, [or to explain] heavenly simplicity by means of today’s roguish witticisms.
Attributed
In S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture (New Delhi: Pragun, 2008): citing Pranebendranath Johann Gottfried Ghosh, Herder's Image of India (1900), p. 334, and Damodar P. Singhal, India and World Civilization (Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1993), p. 231
Attributed
[India is the] "lost paradise of all religions and philosophies," "the cradle of humanity," and also its "eternal home," and the great Orient "waiting to be discovered within ourselves." . . . "mankind's origins can be traced to India, where the human mind got the first shapes of wisdom and virtue with simplicity]], strength and sublimity which has - frankly spoken - nothing, nothing at all equivalent in our philosophical, cold European world." . . . "O holy land, I salute thee, thou source of all music, thou voice of the heart' . . . "Behold the East — cradle of the human race, of human emotion, of all religion."
Attributed
With the regret of a traveler, obliged to leave a country before he learned to know it as he wished, I take leave of Asia. How little we know of it! What we do know comes from such late periods and from such dubious authorities! The eastern part of Asia has become known to us only recently through religious or political parties, and in the hands of scholars in Europe has become so confused in parts that we still see great stretches of it as a fairytale land. In the Near East and in neighboring Egypt everything from all periods appears to us as a ruin or a vanished dream; what we know from written sources we know only from the mouths of passing Greeks, who were partly too young and partly of too foreign a way of thinking to under- stand the deep antiquity of these states; they were only able to grasp what interested them. The archives of Babylon, Phoenicia, and Carthage are no more: Egypt was in its decline, almost before a single Greek visited its interior. Everything has been shrunk down to a few faded pages, containing fables of fables, fragments of history, a dream of the prehistorical world.
Attributed