दर्शनिक यह मानते हैं कि दु:ख या आतंक के कारण ही सब धर्मों का प्रादुर्भाव हुआ है और यदि बिजली की कड़क और चमक हमें नहीं सिखाते तो हम शायद कभी किसी देवी-देवत… - Friedrich Max Müller

Knowledge which has no object beyond itself is, in most cases, but a pretext for vanity. It is so easy, even for the most superficial scholar, to bring together a vast mass of information, bearing more or less remotely on questions of no importance whatsoever. The test of a true scholar is to be able to find out what is really important, to state with precision and clearness the results of long and tedious researches, and to suppress altogether lucubrations, which, though they might display the laboriousness of the writer, would but encumber his subject with needless difficulty.

और इतिहास के पिता हेरोडोटस ने उनकी कृतियों का अकसर उपयोग किया था।

These two sciences. the Science of Language and the Science of Man, cannot. at least for the present, be kept too much asunder; and many misunderstandings, many controversies, would have been avoided. if scholars had not attempted to draw conclusions from language to blood, or from blood to language. When each of these sciences shall have carried out independently its own classification of men and languages, then, and then only, will it be time to compare their results; but even then, I must repeat, what I have said many times before, it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar.(61)