Too oft is transient pleasure the source of long woes.

The compulsion of fate is bitter.

Thinking is easy, acting difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into actions the most difficult thing in the world.

Like Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves...

Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbartThe human power is revealed by poetIl potere dell’umanità si rivela nel poeta

Bewitched is half of everything.

I think of what my father used to say on every tenth of December, back in my home town, Berlin: Now they celebrate the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.

To me, a fairy tale seems to have become reality.

We breathed the air of freedom without knowing the language or any person.

For whatever a man has, is in reality only a gift.

Man blindly works the will of fate.