When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.
Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.
Courage, ne’er by sorrow broken! Aid where tears of virtue flow; Faith to keep each promise spoken! Truth alike to friend and foe!
Joy, thou spark from Heav’n immortal, Daughter of Elysium! Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing Goddess, to thy shrine we come. Thy sweet magic brings together What stern Custom spreads afar; All men become brothers Where thy happy wing-beats are.
The lemonade is weak, like your soul.
O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles.
Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.
I feel an army in my fist.
Virtue is no empty echo.
Appearance should never attain reality, And if nature conquers, then must art retire.
Don’t let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.
I am called The richest monarch in the Christian world; The sun in my dominion never sets.
Man is only fully human when he plays!
It is a ring that makes a marriage and it is from rings that chains are made.
The child of nature, when he breaks loose, becomes a madman; but the art scholar, when he breaks loose, becomes a debased character.
Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.
Misanthropy is a slow suicide.
Mazarin shed tears over this great loss, which Conde, who had no feeling for anything but glory, disregarded. “A single night in Paris,” said he, “gives birth to more men than this action has destroyed.
Brief is the sorrow – endless is the joy!
If desire seizes directly upon its object, contemplation removes its object to a distance, and makes it into a true and inalienable possession by putting it beyond the reach of passion.