"If only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful."

"Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men."

"If you would create something,you must be something."

"Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction."

"What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?"

"Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality."

"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable."

"There is strong shadow where there is much light."

"If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise."

"If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words."

"Solitude is precious balm to my heart in these paradistic parts."

"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language."

"What you feed in yourself that grows."

"Once we are lost unto ourselves, everything else is lost to us."

"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience."

"To end the greatest work designed,A thousand hands need but one mind."

"Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world."

"All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again."

"Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

"Behaviour is a mirror in which every one displays his own image."

"The world admires wealth and velocity-these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity."

"Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home."

"Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones."

"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is."

"You are aware of only one unrest;Oh, never learn to know the other!Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,And one is striving to forsake its brother.Unto the world in grossly loving zest,With clinging tendrils, one adheres;The other rises forcibly in questOf rarefied ancestral spheres.If there be spirits in the airThat hold their sway between the earth and sky,Descend out of the golden vapors thereAnd sweep me into iridescent life.Oh, came a magic cloak into my handsTo carry me to distant lands,I should not trade it for the choicest gown,Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown."

"In art the best is good enough."

"The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself."

"Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this."

"Glib tongues frill up their hash of knowledgefor mankind in polished speechesthat are no more than vaporous windsrustling the fallen leaves in autumn."

"Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops."

"For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is."

"We really learn only from those books that we cannot judge. The author of a book that we were able to judge would have to learn from us."

"There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view."

"Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout."

"It's in the anomalies that nature reveals its secrets."

"If I love you, what business is it of yours?"

"Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes."

"Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise."

"One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best."

"Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it."

"It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one."

"To rule is easy, to govern difficult."

"What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?"

"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest."

"Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks."

"We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created."

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

"The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone."

"It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself."

"No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod."