"A mother gave her children Aesop’s fables to read, in the hope of educating and improving their minds; but they very soon brought the book back, and the eldest, wise beyond his years, delivered himself as follows: This is no book for us; it’s much too childish and stupid. You can’t make us believe that foxes and wolves and ravens are able to talk; we’ve got beyond stories of that kind! In these young hopefuls you have the enlightened Rationalists of the future."

“And O! how the mind is here washed clean of all its early ingrafted Jewish superstition! It is the most profitable and elevating reading which is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death.”

“The New Testament, on the other hand, must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism, and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian. It is its morality which places it in a position of such emphatic and essential antagonism to the Old Testament, so that the story of the Fall is the only possible point of connection between the two.”

“This art is music. It stands quite apart from all the others. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting] which Leibniz took it to be.”

“And O! how the mind is here washed clean of all its early ingrafted Jewish superstition ! It is the most profitable and elevating reading which is possible in the world. It has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death.”

“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.”

“In an essay on ‘“The Christian System,” he argued that the visions of the Old and New Testament are so unalike that the latter “‘must be in some way traceable to an Indian source: its ethical system, its ascetic view of morality, its pessimism and its Avatar, are all thoroughly Indian.””