The Beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.
Poetry, dreams, desire, everything leads me to you.
Our plans and designs should be so perfect in truth and beauty, that in touching them the world could only mar. We should thus have the advantage of setting right what is wrong, and restoring what is destroyed.
Wilhelm, sind das Phantomen, wenn es uns wohl wird?
The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and to possess the aptitude and perseverance to attain it.
Memory extends as far as our self-interest.
Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of life.
Every one has his peculiarities and cannot get rid of them; and yet many a one is destroyed by his peculiarities, and those too of the most innocent kind.
Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.
Men get out of countenance with themselves and others because they treat the means as the end, and so, from sheer doing, do nothing, or, perhaps, just what they would have avoided.
Where one day she’ll be glimpsed: creature who’ll scorch me with love?
He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Do not give in too much to feelings. An overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.