Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.
Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?
Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.
Those whom the gods chose as their property must not consort with mortals.
Plato calls complacency the companion of loneliness.
The sun of a prince’s good graces resembles that in the skies in that it shines most kindly upon the blackest people.
The real genres: good and bad.
When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.
A love that dies has never lived.
Let the will embrace the highest ideals freely and with infinite strength, but let action first take hold of what lies closest.
A woman’s passion is not the measure of a man’s love.
A man may welcome his beloved with circumstance, but a woman’s love and her concern for his well-being are discreet.
How can you say that love is blind? Keener than a young eagle’s is its sight.
Pity, but never love bestows kind words upon the slave.
Since love is folly, a foolish woman is more dangerous than a wise one.
Transcendence: that which transcends experience.
No matter which word it is, when I pronounce repeatedly, it ends up sounding utterly ridiculous and meaningless to me.
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! Considering the countless good books we have, the world would have changed for the better a long time ago.
An uprising would punish only the country, and that is out of the question. But there is yet another approach, the most effectiveform of resistance: contemptuous compliance.
German diligence is actually endurance.