Max Müller

Friedrich Max Müller (December 6, 1823 – October 28, 1900), more commonly known as Max Müller, was a German-born British Philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of Indian studies, who virtually created the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and a popular works on this subject, a discipline he introduced to the British reading public, and the Sacred Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English translations prepared under his direction, stands as an enduring monument to Victorian scholarship.

Quotations

"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."

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"The Upanishads are the ... sources of ... the Vedanta philosophy, a system in which human speculation seems to me to have reached its very acme." "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."

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Max-Muller's opinions about Veda :-

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(1) "Large number of Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme ; tedious, low, commonplace."

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(2) "Nay, they (the Vedas) contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound decidedly modern.

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