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Heinrich Robert Zimmer Quotes

Heinrich Robert Zimmer was a German Indologist and linguist, as well as an historian of South Asian art, most known for his works, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization and Philosophies of India. He was the most important German scholar in Indian Philology after Max Müller . In 2010, a "Heinrich Zimmer Chair for Indian Philosophy and Intellectual History" was inaugurated at Heidelberg University. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. December 1890 – 20. March 1943
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Famous Heinrich Robert Zimmer Quotes

“Hegel's argument—and it is still the argument of those who entertain the old reluctance to confer the title "philosopher" upon the immortal thinkers of India and China—is that something is missing from the Oriental systems. When they are compared with Western philosophy, as developed in antiquity and in modern times, what is obviously lacking is the ever-renewed, fructifying close contact with the progressive natural sciences—their improving critical methods and their increasingly secular, nontheological, practically anti-religious, outlook on man and the world. This is enough, we are asked to agree, to justify the Western restriction of the classic term.”

Heinrich Robert Zimmer

Source: Philosophies of India (1951), p. 30

“When I was a student, the term "Indian philosophy: was usually regarded as self-contradictory, a contradictio in adjecto, comparable to such an absurdity as "wooden steel." "Indian philosophy" was something that simply did not exist.”

Heinrich Robert Zimmer

Source: Philosophies of India (1951), p. 26

“The whole edifice of Indian civilization is imbued with spiritual meaning.”

Heinrich Robert Zimmer

Source: Philosophies of India, Heinrich Zimmer. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

“We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason, why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy and yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom.”

Heinrich Robert Zimmer

Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.

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