page_title: Impact of Tirukkural
section_title: P
hierarchical_section_title: Impact of Tirukkural / P
caption_attribution_description: George Uglow Pope (24 April 1820 – 11 February 1908)
context_page_description: The Tirukkural, shortly known as the Kural, is a classic Tamil sangam treatise on the art of living. Consisting of 133 chapters with 1330 couplets or kurals, it deals with the everyday virtues of an individual. Authored by Valluvar between the third and first centuries BCE, it is considered one of the greatest works ever written on ethics and morality and is praised for its universality and non-denominational nature.
  The Kural is considered chef d'oeuvre of both Indian and world literature. The universality of the work is expressed by the various other names by which the text is given by, such as Tamiḻ maṟai, Poyyāmoḻi, Vāyurai vāḻttu, Ulaga pothumaṟai, and Deiva nūl. The Kural has been praised for its veracity over the millennia by great intellects around the globe.
context_section_description: "[Tirukkural] will be read with pleasure, as affording proof of the existence of the loftiest sentiments, the purest moral rules, and equal power of conception and expression. Nothing certainly, in the whole compass of human language, can equal the force and terseness of the sententious distichs in which the author conveys the lessons of wisdom he utters."
  (Rev. Peter Percival, Christian missionary and the reviser of the Tamil version of the Bible)
  "Perfection of human nature is the be-all and end-all of Kural. Before I resume my seat let me make one humble bow to the Prince of Moralists."
  (J. M. Nallaswami Pillai, Tamil scholar, 1864–1920)
  "Thiruvalluvar, the author of Kural, addresses neither the King, subject, nor priest, but man. He does not address man either as the law-giver or prophet but as well-wisher, teacher and friend. He neither prophesied nor spoke in hints and riddles; his words contained no shade of doubts, he had full conviction of the truth of what he said, both as an artist and thinker."
  "Thiruvalluvar is rightly considered as Chef d'oeuvre of both Indian and world literature. This is due not only to the great artistic merits of the work but also to the lofty humane ideas permeating it which are equally precious to the people all over the world, of all periods and countries."
  (Alexander Piatigorsky, Russian philosopher, 1929–2009)
  "The Kural owes much of its popularity to its exquisite poetic form. The brevity rendered necessary by the form gives an oracular effect to the utterances of the great Tamil 'Master of Sentences'. They are the choicest of moral epigrams. Their resemblance to gnomic poetry of Greece is remarkable as to their subjects, their sentiments and the state of society when they are uttered. Something of the same kind is found in Greek epigrams, in Martial and the Latin elegiac verse. There is a beauty in the periodic character of the Tamil construction in many of these verses that read minds, the reader of the happiest efforts of properties."
  "He was undoubtedly one of the great geniuses of the world. Complete in itself, the sole work of its author (the Kural) has come down the stream of ages, absolutely uninjured, hardly a single various readings of any importance being found. In value it (Kural) outweighs the whole of the remaining Tamil Literature and is one of the selected numbers of great works which have entered into the very soul of a whole people and which can never die."
  (George Uglow Pope, Christian missionary to India, 1820–1908)
caption: George Uglow Pope
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "38", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "510", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "629"}