-
Toleration ought in reality to be merely a transitory mood. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to affront.
-
Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.
-
Mannerism is always longing to have done, and has no true enjoyment in work. A genuine, really great talent, on the other hand, has its greatest happiness in execution.
-
One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.
-
We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.
-
Faith is like private capital, stored in one's own house. It is like a public savings bank or loan office, from which individuals receive assistance in their days of need; but here the creditor quietly takes his interest for himself.
-
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
-
If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.
-
We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out, only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant.
-
We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.
-
Too rigid scruples are concealed pride.
-
You'll never attain it unless you know the feeling.
-
Our foibles are really what make us lovable.
-
Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!
-
The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.
-
Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.
-
Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion.
-
Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.
-
Tomorrow sees undone, what happens not to-day; Still forward press, nor never tire! The possible, with steadfast trust, Resolve should be by the forelock grasp. Then she will ne'er let go her clasp, And labors on, because she must.
-
Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
-
For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.
-
The right man is the one who seizes the moment.
-
Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.
-
The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side.