ऐसे देश की तलाश करूँ जहाँ प्रकृति ने पृथ्वी के किसी हिस्से में सम्पत्ति, शक्ति और सुन्दरता का वरदान दिया है तो मैं भारत की ओर इंगित करूँगा। - Friedrich Max Müller

The worship of Shiva, Vishnu, and other popular deities was of the same and in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo or Minerva. ... A religion may linger on for a long time, it may be accepted by large masses of the people, because it is there, and there is nothing better. But when a religion has ceased to produce defenders of the faith, prophets, champions, martyrs, it has ceased to live, in the true sense of the word; and in that sense the old orthodox Brahmanism has ceased to live for more than a thousand years.

बुद्ध के पहले प्रवचन के समय असंख्य श्रोताओं में से हरेक समझता था कि बुद्ध उसी की ओर देख रहे हैं और उससे उसकी ही बोली में बात कर रहे हैं, हालाँकि वे मागधी में बोल रहे थे।

As sure as the six Romance dialects point to an original home of Italian shepherds on the seven hills at Rome, the Aryan languages together point to an earlier period of language, when the first ancestors of the Indians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slaves, the Celts, and the Germans were living together within the same enclosures, nay, under the same roof. . . . Before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colo- nies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectic germs of all; a clan that had advanced to a state of agricultural civilisation; that had recognised the bonds of blood, and sanctioned the bonds of marriage; and that invoked the Giver of Light and Life in heaven by the same name which you may still hear in the temples of Benares, in the basilicas of Rome, and in our own churches and cathedrals.