Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Just begin and the mind grows heated; continue, and the task will be completed!
What right those who govern have to govern they don’t question, they just govern. Whether the people have a right to depose them that doesn’t concern them. All they are concerned with is that the people will not be tempted to depose them.
All of us have life; few of us have an idea of it.
An absent friend gives us friendly company when we are well assured of his happiness.
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. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.
A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.
Must it ever be thus-that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of nature, overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harrasses me.
A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant ‘there’ becomes the present ‘here,’ all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.
When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation... when I consider all this... I am silent.
No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.
Think of you! I do not think of you; you are always before my soul.
Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt.
Cease endlessly striving for what you would like to do and learn to love what must be done.
Blue: as yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful – but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
Chi non conosce le lingue straniere non conosce nulla della propria.
It is true, I am only a wanderer on, a pilgrim on this earth! But are you more?
What you feed in yourself that grows.
I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever be decried by the world as drunken or insane.