Arthur Schopenhauer on Upanishads

“How every line is of such strong, determined, and consistent meaning! And on every page, we encounter deep, original, hefty thoughts, while the whole is suffused with a high and holy seriousness.”

“The Indian air surrounds us, the original thoughts of kindred spirits ... And O! How the mind is here washed clean of all its early in grafted Jewish superstition! It IS the most profitable and most elevating reading which is possible in the world. ... [Sanskrit literature is] 'the greatest gift of our century.”

“From every sentence deep original and sublime thoughts arise, and a high and holy and earnest spirit pervades the whole. In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads… It has been the solace of my life; and it will be the solace of my death. They are the product of the highest wisdom...”

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries. How entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one, who, by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book, stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul!”

“The view of things … that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; — this theory … may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.”

“And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas, the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century: if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for, if it does not sound too vain, I might express the opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart, though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case.”