All our learned schoolmasters and tutors are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want. But no one likes to think – blindingly obvious though it is, in my view – that grown-ups too, like children, totter around on the earth and, like the children, do not know where they have come from or where they are going, act no more than children do for any true purpose and are just as governed by biscuits, cakes, and the rod.
It is natural that if some fright or calamity surprises us when we are enjoying ourselves it will affect us more strongly than usual, in part because of the contrast thus made very palpable, and in part, and perhaps more, because our senses have been opened to feeling and so take in impressions much faster.
Ah, woe! thy lips are chill, And still. How changed in fashion Thy passion! Who has done me this ill?
Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new.
So the most restless wanderer longs in the end for his homeland again and finds in his cottage, in the arms of his wife, in the midst of his children, in the work of looking after them, the joy he had sought in vain in the wide world.
I came across my diary again today, which for some time I have neglected, and I’m astonished how consciously, step by step, I walked into it all. How clearly I have always seen my condition and acted like a child nevertheless, and how clearly I still see now, and still with no sign of a cure.
Your commercial system has claimed thousands of victims, why not grant a few to Werther?
He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion!
And I run after this phantom of the mind till it leads me to an abyss I shudder back from.
I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.
That the life of man is but a dream, many a man has surmised heretofore; and I, too, am everywhere pursued by this feeling.
One cannot escape the world more certainly through art, and one cannot bind oneself to it more certainly than through art.
How difficult it is to understand one another in this world.
We are happiest under the influence of innocent delusions.
There is no surer way of evading the world than by art; and no surer way of uniting with it than by art.
Aunque se reconcilien, siempre de la calumnia algo queda.
Passions! Intoxication! Insanity! You are so calm and collected, so indifferent, you respectable people, tut-tutting about drunkenness and holding unreasonable behaviour in contempt.
The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.
The question, therefore, is not whether a man is weak or strong, but whether he can endure the full extent of his sufferings, be they of a moral or physical nature.
Danger takes from a man all power of thought.