"Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!"

"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the skeptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasn'ing but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much."

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man."

"All nature is but art unknown to thee, All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."

"Our proper bliss depends on what we blame."

"As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns As the rapt seraph that adores and burns. To Him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all!"

"Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees."

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul."

"Remembrance and reflection how allied! What thin partitions sense from thought divide!"

"Die of a rose in aromatic pain."

"Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason,—man is not a fly."

"Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; My footstool earth, my canopy the skies."

"In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies; All quit their spere, and rush into the skies! Pride still is aiming at the blessed abodes, Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods. Aspiring to be Gods if Angels fell, Aspiring to be Angels men rebel."

"But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company."

"Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; His soul proud Science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way; Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n, Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heav'n."

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest. The soul, uneasy and confined from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come."

"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and now a world."

"Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."

"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescrib'd, their present state."

"'T is but a part we see, and not a whole."

"Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find, Why form'd so weak, so little, and so blind? First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess, Why form'd no weaker, blinder, and no less!"

"Say first, of God above or man below, What can we reason but from what we know?"

"Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, And catch the manners living as they rise: Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to man."

"Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield."

"Awake, my St John! Leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us, since life can little more supply Than just to look about us, and to die, Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! But not without a plan."

"I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the entirely hypothetical character of the dates I ventured to assign to the first three periods of Vedic literature. All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates"

"Of the Vedic poetic art Watkins writes: “The language of India from its earliest documentation in the Rigveda has raised the art of the phonetic figure to what many would consider its highest form”."

"All attempts to date the Vedic literature on linguistic grounds have failed miserably for the simple reason that (a) the conclusions of comparative philology are often speculative and (b) no one has yet suceeded in showing how much change should take place in a language in a given period."

"There is nothing in any of the 1,028 poems that make up the collection to suggest that their authors were incomers to the area that they describe in their poems. Rather the opposite."

"If we can dig beneath the assumptions about meaning that overlay the text... we shall uncover a very different Rigveda from the one that we have come to accept."

"There was nothing in the Rgveda to look for a primitive or primarily nomadic society [sic]. . . . Chariots and wagons and boats which occur so frequently in the Rgveda do not agree well with nomadism. Movement of cars presupposes existence of roads and defined routes, which in turn presuppose settlements and regular traffic from point to point. Boats and ships are not floating logs. They presuppose ferry ghats and fixed destinations. . . , there was much in the Rgveda that defied explanation. . . . But instead of reconciling the discordant features, scholars either ignored them or distorted the facts and features. (Singh 1995, 8)"

"That age [of the Rigveda] is not known with even an approximate degree of certainty."

"These dates Mueller later insisted were minimum dates only, , and latterly there has been a sort of tacit agreement.... to date the composition of the Rigveda somewhere about 1400-1500 BC, but without any absolutely conclusive evidence."

"The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years."

"It is quite clear that we cannot fix a terminum a quo, whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or 2000 or 3000 years BC, no power on earth will ever determine"

"Favour ye this my laud, O Gangā, Yamunā, O Sutudri, Paruṣṇī and Sarasvatī: With Asikni, Vitasta, O Marudvrdha, O Ārjīkīya with Susoma hear my call. First with Trstama thou art eager to flow forth, with Rasā, and Susartu, and with Svetya here, With Kubha; and with these, Sindhu and Mehatnu, thou seekest in thy course Krumu and Gomati."

"The people deck him like a docile king of elephants."

"We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered. Now what may foeman's malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man's deception?"

"Sarasvati, pure in her course from the mountains to the sea."

"Brbu hath set himself above the Panis, o'er their highest head, Like the wide bush on Ganga's bank."

"Do adore with salutations the deva asura[Rudra]."

"Here did our human fathers take their places, fain to fulfil the sacred Law of worship."

"Your ancient home, your auspicious friendship, O Heroes, your wealth is on the banks of the Jahnavi."

"May we not anger you, O God, in our worship By praise that is unworthy or by scanty tribute."

"The wise speak of what is One in many ways."

"Max Müller, Weber, Muir, and others held that the Punjab was the main scene of the activity of the Rgveda, whereas the more recent view put forth by Hopkins and Keith is that it was composed in the country round the SarasvatI river south of modem AmbAla.”"

"[The Vedic Gods] “are nearer to the physical phenomena which they represent, than the gods of any other Indo-European mythology”."

"The Rigveda “reflects not so much a wandering life…. as a life stable and fixed, a life of halls and cities, and shows sacrificial cases in such detail as to lead one to suppose that the hymnists were not on the tramp, but were comfortable well-fed priests” [...] If the first home of the Aryans can be determined at all by the conditions topographical and meteorological, described in their early hymns, then decidedly the Punjab was not that home. For here there are neither mountains nor monsoon storms to burst, yet storm and mountain belong to the very marrow of the Rigveda. ...[it is] ―a district [...] where monsoon storms and mountain scenery are found, that district, namely, which lies South of Umballa (or Ambālā). It is here, in my opinion, that the Rigveda, taken as a whole, was composed. In every particular, this locality fulfils the physical conditions under which the composition of the hymns was possible, and what is of paramount importance, is the first district east of the Indus that does so."