Only by himself, with one acre and a house, will a dunce be a dunce. Once he manages to gain power, he'll turn into a scoundrel.
Once you have looked at the land from atop the Kahlenberg, you will understand what I write and who I am.
Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small.
In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.
Strength, strength alone, is honorable, the German nation clamors in its majesty. But since it is hard to muster strength so suddenly, they have to make do with boorishness.
Schiller moves upward. Goethe comes from up above.
To enlist the support of the people and of parliament, you only have to propose a profitable villainy.
Man will return to his origins. Goethe has finally become as squiggly as the city of his fathers.
Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless.
The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.
Man lives two lives, woe, were it otherwise! One is seized by death, the other one, his honor, remains.
Who claims that the heathen's view of the world is incorrect? Life gives you nothing! It is ruled by false gods! Nothing remains true to you but your own self; provided you remain true to it.
How frightening it is to have reached the height of human accomplishment in art that must forever borrow from life's abundance.
I am a woman, and even if I could proceed with harshness and rigidity, it would disgust me nonetheless.
Those whom the gods chose as their property must not consort with mortals.
Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.
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.
The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.
Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors? Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).
The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
My anger thought you too ignoble for my love, and close examination finds you too magnificent, and only equals are joined together smoothly.
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.
The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.
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