Max Muller Quotes

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.

Education must establish the moral unity of mankind.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The work of Aryan peoples shows a true creative spirit. The Jew is mostly a merchant, as he was for millennia in the past. There are no Jewish construction workers in Germany, no smiths, no Jewish miners or seamen. Nearly all major inventions were made by Aryans. The goal of the Jew is to make himself the ruler of humanity. Wherever he comes, he destroys works of culture. He is not a creative spirit, rather a destructive spirit.

Among the first, perhaps the very first, instrument for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge, and to the acquisition of much of the knowledge adapted to the wants, the comforts, and enjoyments of human life public institutions and seminaries of learning are essential.

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.

I do not care what philosophy you take up; only I am ready to prove here that throughout the whole of India, there runs a mutual and cordial string of eternal faith in the perfection of humanity, and I believe in it myself. And let that faith be spread over the whole land.

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.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

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.

I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.

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

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.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

Plato--who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events--knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.

The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.

As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.

When I went to school, they told me literature was a rope I must use to climb out of the dark well of unknowing. Writers are the knots on the rope.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity.

I hope that at this moment you are thinking of yourself as a human being rather than as an American, Asian, European, African, or member of any particular country. These loyalties are secondary.

For whatever reason I was always obsessed with the potential of humanity's physicality. Especially since we grew up with such a non-physical philosophy.