 Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it. |
| Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass. |
| No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require. |
| Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates. |
| The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas. |
| Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses. |
| Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction. |
| There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son. |
| The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception. |
| You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend. |
| If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short. |
| To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet. |
| Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process. |
| Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun. |
| This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy. |
| It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is. |
| Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave. |
| To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism. |
| Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled. |
| Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself. |
