Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Max Muller (German-British Orientalist)

Max Müller (1823–1900,) fully Friedrich Max Müller, was a German-born Indologist and Sanskritist. A scholar of comparative language, religion, and mythology, he also pioneered the comparative study of Indo-European languages. His particular areas of interest were Sanskrit philology, comparative mythology, and the religions of India.

Born in Dessau, Germany, where his father, the poet Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827,) was ducal librarian, Müller studied at Dessau, Leipzig and Berlin, taking the then-novel subject of Sanskrit and its kindred sciences of philology and religion.

Moving to Paris, Müller worked under the French Sanskritist, Buddhologist, and Indologist Eugène Burnouf. Müller produced translations of Hitopadeśa and Kalidasa’s Meghadūta. He began to prepare his edition of the vast collection of the sacred hymns of the Ṛgveda, Ṛg Veda Samhitā: The Sacred Hymns of the Bráhmans (6 vols., 1849–73.)

With financial support from the East India Company, Müller went to England in 1846 to examine Eastern manuscripts. He remained at Oxford for the rest of his life, serving as the Taylorian Professor of Modern Languages 1854 and Professor of Comparative Philology 1868–1900.

Among Müller’s most famous works are Lectures on the Science of Language (1861–64,) Auld Lang Syne (1898,) and My Indian Friends (1898.) His other notable works are Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religions of India (1878,) India, What Can It Teach Us? (1898,) Rāmakrishna, His Life and Sayings (1898,) and The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899.)

Müller edited the Sacred Books of the East (51 vols., 1879–1910,) which included his famous translation of the Dhammapada (1881) from Pāli. Müller also began the series Sacred Books of the Buddhists in 1895.

Biographies of Müller include Johannes Voigt’s Max Müller (1967) and Lourens Van Den Bosch’s Friedrich Max Müller (2002.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Max Muller

Every occupation, plan, and work of man, to be truly successful, must be done under the direction of Christ, in union with his will, from love to him, and in dependence on his power.
Max Muller
Topics: Christian

Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might more truly be called the knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.
Max Muller
Topics: Philosophy

He only shows mankind how beautiful everything is which man’s hand has not yet spoiled or broken.
Max Muller

No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.
Max Muller
Topics: Happiness

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.
Max Muller
Topics: Language

Religion is trust, and that trust arose in the beginning from the impressions made on the mind and heart of man by the order and wisdom of nature, and more particularly, by those regularly recurring events, the return of the sun, the revival of the moon, the order of the seasons, the law of cause and effect, gradually discovered in all things, and traced back in the end to a cause of all causes, by whatever name we choose to call it.
Max Muller

How mankind defers from day to day the best it can do, and the most beautiful things it can enjoy, without thinking that every day may be the last one, and that lost time is lost eternity!
Max Muller
Topics: Procrastination

If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. It may seem almost like a truism, that no religion can continue to be what it was during the lifetime of its founder and its first apostles.
Max Muller

On religions: He who knows one, knows none.
Max Muller

All the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a high truth could meet with ready acceptance.”
Max Muller

Men in earnest have no time to waste in patching fig leaves for the naked truth.
Max Muller
Topics: Truth

Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases. The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbors, examples of purity and unselfishness. What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realized, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offer often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples.
Max Muller

A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.
Max Muller

Without a belief in personal immortality religion is like an arch resting on one pillar, or like a bridge ending in an abyss.
Max Muller
Topics: Immortality

Christianity is a missionary religion, converting, advancing, aggressive, encompassing the world; a non-missionary church is in the bands of death.
Max Muller
Topics: Christianity

What would the science of language be without missions.
Max Muller
Topics: Language

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