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

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.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

I definitely would like to do something serious. Not like a love story, but serious like maybe a gangster or a mobster. A gang or a mob movie would be great.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

The mob is a sort of bear; while your ring is through its nose, it will even dance under your cudgel; but should the ring slip, and you lose your hold, the brute will turn and rend you.

The vision that the founding fathers had of rule of law and equality before the law and no one above the law, that is a very viable vision, but instead of that, we have quasi mob rule.

A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

What impressed me particularly in Vienna was the strict order everywhere. No mob disturbances of any kind, in spite of the greatly increased liberty and relaxation of police regulations.

There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.

Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.

Mob law is the most forcible expression of an abnormal public opinion; it shows that society is rotten to the core.