35 quotes
The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country.
It is necessary that we too should see the beam in our own eyes, and learn to distinguish between the Christianity of the nineteenth century and the religion of Christ.
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
It is language and religion that make a people, but religion is even a more powerful agent than language.
India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education.
Without a belief in personal immortality, religion surely is like an arch resting on one pillar, like a bridge ending in an abyss.
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life... I should point to India.
Without a subject there is no object in the world, without understanding there is nothing to understand, without mind no matter.
The Silesian Horseherd (1899)
It is almost impossible to speak of religion at all, without giving offence either on the right or on the left. With some, religion seems too sacred a subject for scientific treatment.
He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one.
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
The man who is free from credulity, but knows the uncreated, who has cut all ties, removed all temptations, renounced all desires, he is the greatest of men.
Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later states.
Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns , whether 1500 or 15,000 B.C. , they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world " .
Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 B.C.E. or 15,000 B.C.E., they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world. They tell us something of the early growth of the human mind of which we find no trace anywhere else.
We shall then learn that the history of mankind is the best philosophy, and that not only in Christianity and Judaism, but that in all religions of the world, God has at divers times spoken through the prophets in divers manners, and still speaks.
The Silesian Horseherd (1899)
They gave to the new cities and to the rivers along which they settled, the names of cities and rivers familiar to them, and reminding them of the localities which they had left.
Max Muller (1875)
The worship of Shiva, Vishnu, and other popular deities was of the same and in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo or Minerva.
Lecture at Westminster Abbey (1873)
I do not wish by what I have said to raise any exaggerated expectations as to the worth of these ancient hymns of the Veda, and the character of that religion which they indicate rather than fully describe.
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
Still the child betrays the passions of the man, and there are hymns, though few in number, in the Veda, so full of thought and speculation that at this early period no poet in any other nation could have conceived them.
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
Then first came love upon it, the new spring
Of mind — yea, poets in their hearts discerned,
Pondering, this bond between created things
And uncreated...
If an answer must be given as to the place where our Aryan ancestors dwelt before their separation, . . . I should still say, as I said forty years ago, 'Somewhere in Asia,' and no more.