Franz Grillparzer Quotes
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You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power.
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The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
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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.
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When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental-far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.
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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.
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The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
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I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.
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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.
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Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.
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Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.
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Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.
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When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
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Prose talks and poetry sings.
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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.
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Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
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Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?
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To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
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I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else.
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Die Irreligiösen sind religiöser als sie selbst wissen, und die Religiösen sind's weniger, als sie meinen.
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If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.