Max Muller Quotes

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, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life...again I should point to India

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

The knowledge of the past times and of the places of the earth is both an ornament and nutriment to the human mind.

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study. God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

In Vedic times, we had the great quest for the unknown. We did wonderful things; we celebrate our past vigyaan and our wonderful heritage of science and technology of the Vedic times.

Samskrit language, as has been universally recognized by those competent to form a judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect, the most prominent and wonderfully sufficient literary instrument developed by the human mind.

For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it's great books, the "Upnishads," and the "Bhagavad Gita."

When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy.

There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or the East that is not active in some Indian mind

Old heads as well as young may sometimes be charged with ignorance and presumption. The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Whatever else India may not be, she is at least one thing, She is the greatest storehouse of spiritual knowledge.

Revolution starts in the mind. Question everything!

The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.

The mind is a strange and wonderful thing. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to figure itself out. Everything else maybe, from the atom to the universe, everything except itself.

We want the education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one's own feet.

India's openness to new ideas is manifest in the Rig Veda: Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides.

You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.

History is the record of human progress, a record of the struggle of the advancement of the human mind, of the human spirit, towards some known or unknown objective.

In the history of the world the Vedas fill a gap which no literary work in any other language could fill. I maintain that to everybody who cares for himself for his ancestors for his intellectual development a study of the Vedic literature is indeed indispensable.

Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and in India only.

The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.