Max Müller quotes

Max Müller was a German-born philologist and orientalist, renowned for his pioneering work in the study of comparative religion and languages. His research greatly contributed to the understanding of ancient sacred texts, especially those from India. He became one of the leading figures in introducing Eastern philosophical thought to the Western world. Here are 70 of his quotes:

I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood.

Max Müller

While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.

Max Müller

Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries; but who can tell or who can explain them!

Max Müller

Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is.

Max Müller

Whoever knows it also knows that in love there is no More and no Less; but that he who loves can only love with the whole heart, and with the whole soul; with all his strength and with all his will.

Max Müller

Would you say that any one sacred book is superior to all others in the world? ... I say the New Testament, after that, I should place the Koran, which in its moral teachings, is hardly more than a later edition of the New Testament. Then would follow according to my opinion the Old Testament, the Southern Buddhist Tripitaka, the Tao-te-king of Laotze, the Kings of Confucius, the Veda and the Avesta.

Max Müller

Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?

Max Müller

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 the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years.

Max Müller

The spring of love becomes hidden and soon filled up.

Max Müller

Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older.

Max Müller

It smote me to the heart that I had found no one in all the world who loved me more than all others.

Max Müller

Soon the child learns that there are strangers, and ceases to be a child.

Max Müller

I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language... in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians... To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.

Max Müller

He who knows only one religion knows none.

Max Müller

The Veda may be called primitive, because there is no other literary document more primitive than it; but the language, the mythology, the religion and philosophy that meet us in the Veda open vistas of the past which no one would venture to measure in years. Nay, they contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound modern, or secondary and tertiary, as I called them, but which nevertheless are older than any other literary document, and give us trustworthy information of a period in the history of human thought of which we knew absolutely nothing before the discovery of the Vedas.

Max Müller

It is quite clear that we cannot fix a terminum a quo, whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or 2000 or 3000 years BC, no power on earth will ever determine.

Max Müller

I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the entirely hypothetical character of the dates I ventured to assign to the first three periods of Vedic literature. All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates.

Max Müller

India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education.

Max Müller

There will be and can be no rest till we admit, what cannot be denied, that there is in man a third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason; but yet, I suppose, a very real power, if we see how it has held its own from the beginning of the world - how neither sense nor reason has been able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense.

Max Müller

I wish to point out that there was another sphere of intellectual activity in which the Hindus excelled–the meditative and transcendent–and that here we might learn from them some lessons of life which we ourselves are but too apt to ignore or to despise.

Max Müller

Not far from our house, and opposite the old church with the golden cross, stood a large building, even larger than the church, and having many towers.

Max Müller

What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or the Creator without the creature?

Max Müller