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.
Category Archive: 1791
The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.
Those who want to row on the ocean of human knowledge do not get far, and the storm drives those out of their course who set sail.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet’s task to turn it into an audience.
To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, with his martial cloak around him.
Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses.
The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We’re progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.