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.

No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.

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.

Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.

There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.

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.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

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.

Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses.

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.

Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.

To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism.

Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.

If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept.

You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.

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.

No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.

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.

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.

Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.

I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.

Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.

When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.

The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.

The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.

Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.

How frightening it is to have reached the height of human accomplishment in art that must forever borrow from lifes abundance.

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers--his hopes.

Servants honor their master by their service.

Austrian soldiers are like horses: brave but easily frightened.

Turning popular opinion upside down does not make an original.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.