Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness, and especially for yellow-red.
The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.
This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.
Those only obtain love, for the most part, who seek it not.
What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?
Art is a mediator of the unspeakable.
Only the heart without a stain knows ease.
What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.
The nude is the perfect expression of freedom. Freedom to be.
Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world, becoming aware of it if only within himself, and of himself self only within it. Each new subject, well observed, opens up within us a new organ of thought.
It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student.
It is bad governments, not bad people, who cause revolutions.
Perseverance is a silent power that grows irresistibly greater with time.
The soul-stirring image of death is no bugbear to the sage, and is looked on without despair by the pious. It teaches the former to live, and it strengthens the hopes of the latter in salvation in the midst of distress. Death is new life to both.
But the valid issue is the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command.
Thus I reel from desire to fulfillment and in fulfillment languish for desire.
It is better to be doing the most insignificant thing than to reckon even a half-hour insignificant.
A lot of people do not care about your money until nearly penniless. They also do so with time.
Man errs, till he has ceased to strive.
All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.