I could be living the best and happiest of lives if only I were not a fool.
Alles nahe werde fern.
Poetry is not simply a fashion of expression: it is the form of expression absolutely required by a certain class of ideas. Poetry, indeed, may be distinguished from Prose by the single circumstance, that it is the utterance of whatever in man cannot be perfectly uttered in any other than a rhythmical form: it is useless to say that the naked meaning is independent of the form: on the contrary, the form contributes essentially to the fullness of the meaning.
But you will never know another’s heart, unless you are prepared to give yours too.
Anyone that doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
If I love you, is that any of your business?
Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.
When any distress or terror surprises us in the midst of our amusements, it naturally makes a deeper impression than at other times, either because the contrast makes us more keenly susceptible, or rather perhaps because our senses are then more open to impressions, and the shock is consequently stronger.
The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword.
I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.
But there are times,” said Charlotte, “when it is necessary and an act of friendship to write nothing rather than not to write.
We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.
Fortunately a human being can comprehend only a certain degree of unhappiness; anything beyond it destroys him or leaves him cold. There are situations in which fear and hope become one and the same, cancel one another out, and lose themselves in a dark insensateness. How else could we know the people we love best to be in continual danger and yet go on with our daily lives as usual?
It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.
He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.
Show me the man who has the courage to hide his ill-humour, who bears the whole burden himself, without disturbing the peace of those around him. No: ill-humour arises from an inward consciousness of our own want of merit, from a discontent which ever accompanies that envy which foolish vanity engenders. We see people happy, whom we have not made so, and cannot endure the sight.
We so frequently feel that we are lacking in many qualities which another person apparently possesses; and then we furnish such a person with everything we oirselves possess and witj a certain idealistic complacemny in addition. And in this fashion a Happy Being is finished to perfection – the creature of our imagination.
This is another one of those creatures whom, like the pelican, I have fed with the blood of my own heart... There were special circumstances close at hand, urgent, troubling me, and they resulted in the state of mind that produced Werther. I had lived, loved, and suffered much... That’s what it was.
You are aware of only one unrest; Oh, never learn to know the other! Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its affinity with black.