Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
|
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
|
Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already b...
|
Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man rem...
|
I notice well that one stray step from the habitual path leads irresistibly into a new direction. Life moves forward, it never reverses its co...
|
If someone took the finest marble and knew how to shape it artfully: Prometheus' material was lowly clay, but his statues walked.
|
What is done for the children is doubly beneficial, since their success, obvious to everyone, educates the parents as well.
|
A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.
|
Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful tone is silenced.
|
Just as the queen bee, the highest-ranking, peerless creature of her hive, is surrounded by lowly drones to please her, whereas the workers pr...
|
Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.
|
How frightening it is to have reached the height of human accomplishment in art that must forever borrow from life's abundance.
|
If only it were God's will that printed and written materials have as much influence on the people as the princes and their censors fear! Cons...
|
Man lives two lives, woe, were it otherwise! One is seized by death, the other one, his honor, remains.
|
Gratitude is a fickle thing, indeed. A person taking aim presses the weapon to his chest and cheek, but when he hits, he discards it with indi...
|
Chance arrives unannounced. It emerges, and when it leaves, we are lucky if the changes it has produced are only external.
|
German radicalism: freedom-masturbation.
|
Oh that wisdom was half as zealous for converts as ridicule.
|
Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connois...
|
In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.
|
She sought her happiness exclusively in the happiness of others. Death gave her her own.
|
Art compares to nature like wine to the grape.
|
As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.
|
Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!
|
A love that dies has never lived.
|
But when all you do, great man, is to empty our pockets, we wish that you were smaller!
|
'What are the characteristics of today's world so that one may recognize it by them?' It pays pensions and borrows money: credit and monuments...
|
Woman is the crown of all creation, but Man is the head who wears it, and even the servant is master in his house.
|
The prince exults whomever he selects as his consort, but the queen, rather than elevating the subject of her choice, humiliates him as a man....
|
Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!
|