Wherever a man may happen to turn, whatever a man may undertake, he will always end up by returning to the path which nature has marked out for him.

Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.

Only learn to seize good fortune, for good fortune is always here.

Unlike grown-ups, children have little need to deceive themselves

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

It is better to busy one’s self about the smallest thing in the world than to treat a half hour as worthless

The little man is still a man.

What I possess I would gladly retain. Change amuses the mind, yet scarcely profits.

People do not mind their faults being spread out before them, but they become impatient if called on to give them up.

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s...

By seeking and blundering we learn.

I will say nothing… against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have...

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.

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

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.

People may live as much retired from the world as they like, but sooner or later they find themselves debtor or creditor to some one.

Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths.

No one as ever completed their apprenticeship.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

He who moves not forward, goes backward

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

Enjoy what you can, endure what you must

The highest problem of every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the illusion of a loftier reality

When you praise someone you call yourself his equal

Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.

Ambition and love are the wings to great deeds.

Man errs as long as he strives

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

Gray is the color of all theory

Their is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

What you inherit from your fathermust first be earned before it’s yours.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

Wenn die Blattläuse auf den Rosenzweigen sitzen und sich hübsch dick und grün gesogen haben, dann kommen die Ameisen und saugen ihnen den filtrierten Saft aus den Leibern. Und so geht’s weiter, und wir haben’s...

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

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

My father gave my stature tall,And rule of life decorous;My mother my nature genialAnd joy in making stories;Full well my grandsire loved the fair,A tendency that lingers;My grandam gold and gems so rare,An itch still...

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that

What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes

If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is; but if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what...

A purpose you impart is no longer your own.

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.

Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.

Everyone hears only what he understands.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a...

People have a peculiar pleasure in making converts, that is, in causing others to enjoy what they enjoy, thus finding their own likeness represented and reflected back to them.