If we put ourselves in the place of other people, the jealousy and hatred we so often feel about them would disappear, and if we put others in our place, pride and conceit would greatly diminish.
All is like, all unlike; all is useful and harmful, eloquent and dumb, reasonable and unreasonable. And what people profess about individual matters is often contradictory.
A man’s name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over and over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.
For in music there is no material to be deducted.
There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do anything worth doing.
No one should desire to live in irregular circumstances; but if by chance a man falls into them, they test his character and show of how much determination he is capable.
Entbehren sollst du – sollst entbehren. Thou shalt forego, shalt do without.
He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.
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?