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.

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.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

It's been my dream to have four babies by 30. I look after animals, so I'd have a lot to give my kids.