Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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If someone took the finest marble and knew how to shape it artfully: Prometheus' material was lowly clay, but his statues walked.
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What is done for the children is doubly beneficial, since their success, obvious to everyone, educates the parents as well.
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Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.
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A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.
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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.
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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...
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How frightening it is to have reached the height of human accomplishment in art that must forever borrow from life's abundance.
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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...
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Bunglers and pedants judge art according to genre; they approve of this and dismiss that genre, but instead of genres, the open-minded connois...
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She sought her happiness exclusively in the happiness of others. Death gave her her own.
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Man lives two lives, woe, were it otherwise! One is seized by death, the other one, his honor, remains.
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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...
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Chance arrives unannounced. It emerges, and when it leaves, we are lucky if the changes it has produced are only external.
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German radicalism: freedom-masturbation.
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Oh that wisdom was half as zealous for converts as ridicule.
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In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.
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Art compares to nature like wine to the grape.
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As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.
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Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!
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A love that dies has never lived.
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But when all you do, great man, is to empty our pockets, we wish that you were smaller!
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'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...
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Woman is the crown of all creation, but Man is the head who wears it, and even the servant is master in his house.
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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....
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Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!
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