It is better to do the smallest thing in the world than to hold half an hour to be too small a thing.
To be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.
The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
Every situation – nay, every moment – is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.
One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.
Once I blazed across the sky, Leaving trails of flame; I fell to earth, and here I lie – Who’ll help me up again? -A Shooting Star.
The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine.
I laugh at my heart, and do its will.
You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.
Keep not standing fixed and rooted. Briskly venture, briskly roam.
Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it’s alive; then they have the parts and the’be lost the whole, for the link that’s missing was the living soul.
The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. – Faust 1, lines 182-3.
The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.
If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.
Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest.
If you don’t feel it, you’ll never get it.