F. Max Müller

“ I was quite satisfied with that ideal India which I had built up for myself, whether from their books or from those who had come to see me at Oxford. If my India, as I am often told, is an ideal India, is it more so than Greece as seen through the poems of Homer, or Italy as seen through the verses of Virgil? What is ideal is not necessarily unreal, it is only like a landscape seen in sunshine. Look at a landscape on a brilliant summer’s day bathed in light and verdure, and again on a bleak day of March with its bitter winds and cloudy sky. ”

“ Thus to the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan, as to the enlightened mind of to-day, not to see it was utter blindness. What we call science, law, morality, religion, was in his view pervaded alike throughout by this concept of Divine presence, or else it would have been less than a dream that had not come to the awaking. He was a follower of the light, not from the senses or the logical understanding, but from the eternal world. Let us not dwell on any darker shade of the picture. Clouds are dark to those who are beneath them; but on the upper side, where the sun shines, they glow with golden splendor. ”

“ To-day I am content, if you will admit, that our mind is not mere steam, nor the world merely a steam-engine, but that in order that the machine shall run, that the eye shall see, the ear hear, the mind think, add, and subtract, we need a seer, a hearer, a thinker. More than this I will not inflict on you to-day; but you see that without deviating a finger's breadth from the straight path of reason, that is from correct and honest addition and subtraction, we finally come to the soul-phantom and to the idea of God, which you look upon with such blood-thirstiness. ”

“ The wings of the soul lose their plumes; the leaves of the flower fast fall off and wither; and of this fountain of love there remain but a few drops. We still call these few drops love, but it is no longer the clear, fresh, all-abounding child-love. It is love with anxiety and trouble, a consuming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like rain-drops upon the hot sand; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice; love which says "Wilt thou be mine," not love which says, "I must be thine." It is a most selfish, vacillating love. ”

“ Again, when after a wild and tearful night the sun dawned in the morning, smiling on man—when after a dreary and deathlike winter spring came again with its sunshine and flowers, there were feelings of joy and gratitude, of love and adoration in the heart of every human being; but though there were names for the sun and the spring, for the bright sky and the brilliant dawn, there was no word by which to call the source of all this gladness, the giver of light and life. ”

“ If the azure hue is inseparable from distant mountains and from the distant sky, we need not wonder that it veils the distant paradise of youth. A man who keeps a diary from his earliest years, and who as an old man simply copies from its yellow pages, may give us a very accurate black and white image of what he saw as a boy, but as in old faded photographs, the life and light are gone out of them, while unassisted memory may often preserve tints of their former reality. There is life and light in such recollections, but I am willing to admit that memory can be very treacherous also. ”