The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.

Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself.

When one considers the sublime disposition underlying the tmly universal educatiOn (of traditional India) ... then what IS or has been called religion in Europe seems to us to be scarcely deserving of that name. And one feels compelled to advise those who Wish to witness religion to travel to India for that purpose ....

The divine origin of man, as taught by Vedanta, IS continually inculcated, to stimulate his efforts to return, to animate him in the struggle, and incite him to consider a reunion and reincorporation with Divinity as the one primary object of every action and reaction. Even the loftiest philosophy of the European, the idealism of reason as it is set forth by the Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun, faltering and feeble and ever ready to be extinguished.

India is pre-eminently distinguished for the many traits of original grandeur of thought and of the wonderful remains of immediate knowledge.

The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was indigenous to India and was brought into Greece by Pythagoras.

It cannot be denied that the early Indians possessed knowledge of God. All their writings are replete with sentiments and expressions, noble, clear, severely grand, as deeply conceived in any human language in which men have spoken of their God.

Whether directly or indirectly all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies... the oriental antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely towards the divine....

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom.

The most important subject, and the first problem of philosophy, is the restoration in man of the lost image of God; so far as this relates to science.Should this restoration in the internal consciousness be fully understood, and really brought about, the object of pure philosophy is attained.

Only a man who is at one with the world can be at one with himself.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

Honour is the mysticism of legality.

In the same way as philosophy loses sight of its true object and appropriate matter, when either it passes into and merges in theology, or meddles with external politics, so also does it mar its proper form when it attempts to mimic the rigorous method of mathematics.

In England ... everything becomes professional ... even the rogues of that island are pedants.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated to the level of the classic.

Romantic poetry ... recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.

To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.

To disrespect the masses is moral; to honor them, lawful.

There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.

The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit. Therefore scatter holy seeds into the soil of the spirit.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

All those countless battles-those endless, and... for the greater part, useless wars, of which... fills up for so many thousand years... are but little atoms compared with the great whole of human destiny.