Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
Life is all too wondrous sweet, and the world is so beautifully bewildered; it is the dream of an intoxicated divinity...
All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.
No compass has ever been invented for the high seas of matrimony.
As the moon’s fair image quaketh In the raging waves of ocean, Whilst she, in the vault of heaven, Moves with silent peaceful motion.
The nightingale appear’d the first, And as her melody she sang, The apple into blossom burst, To life the grass and violets sprang.
The air grows cool and darkles, The Rhine flows calmly on; The mountain summit sparkles In the light of the setting sun.
From every Englishman emanates a kind of gas, the deadly choke-damp of boredom.
People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
It is there, where they burn books, that eventually they burn people.
Seriousness shows itself more majestically when laughter leads the way.
He always maintained that we fear something because we recognize it as fearsome through rational inferences, and that only the reason had any power; the heart had none. While I ate well and drank well, he kept demonstrating to me the advantages of reason... In striving after the positive, the poor man had argued away all life’s splendour, all the sunbeams, all the faith and all the flowers, leaving nothing but the cold, positive grave.
One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies – but not before they have been hanged.
Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.
Like a great poet, nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the utmost economy of means: nothing but sun, trees, flowers, water, and love. Of course, if the latter is absent from the beholder’s heart, the whole landscape will be an unpleasing sight; then the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, and the trees provide good firewood, and the flowers are classified according to the number of their stamens, and the water is wet.
For the Greeks, beauty is truth; for the Hebrews, truth is beauty.
Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Golgatha.
Onde se queimam livros, acaba-se queimando pessoas.
The ancient, tremulous woman who was sitting behind the stove opposite the big cupboard may have sat there for a quarter of a century, and her thoughts and feelings are closely interwoven with every corner of the stove and every carving on the cupboard. And the stove and cupboard are alive, for part of a human soul has entered into them.
So long as my heart is full of love and the heads of my fellow-men are full of folly, I shall never lack something to write about.
Gott wird mir verzeihen, das ist sein Beruf.