We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.
I honor health as the first Muse.
All high beauty has a moral element in it.
Sometimes we receive the power to say yes to life. Then peace enters us and makes us whole.
Truth is always present; it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind’s eye to read its oracles.
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; If I cannot carry forests on my back, Neither can you crack a nut.
The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.
Goodness that preaches undoes itself.
The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; – read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.
Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.
There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.
We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul.