"Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last! Loitering slow, the Future creepeth — Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth — And motionless forever stands the Past."

"Der Menscheit Würde ist in Eure Hand gegeben, bewahret Sie! Sie sinkt mit euch! Mit euch wird sie sich heben!"

"Only through Beauty's morning gate, dost thou enter the land of Knowledge."

"On the mountains there is freedom! The world is perfect everywhere, Save where man comes with his torment."

"Don't let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain."

"What are hopes, what are plans?"

"Life is only error, And death is knowledge."

"Pain is short, and joy is eternal."

"Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield! Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason, Resplendent daughter of the head divine, Wise foundress of the system of the world, Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou, Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed, Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd, Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss. Accursed, who striveth after noble ends, And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans! To the fool-king belongs the world."

"Who dares impede my progress? Who presume The spirit to control which guideth me? Still must the arrow wing its destined flight! Where danger is, there must Johanna be; Nor now, nor here, am I foredoomed to fall; Our monarch's royal brow I first must see Invested with the round of sovereignty. No hostile power can rob me of my life, Till I've accomplished the commands of God."

"Das Leben ist Nur ein Moment, der Tod ist auch nur einer!"

"Was man nicht aufgibt, hat man nie verloren."

"I am better than my reputation."

"Man kann den Menschen nicht verwehren, Zu denken, was sie wollen."

"Appearance should never attain reality, And if nature conquers, then must art retire."

"O tender yearning, sweet hoping! The golden time of first love! The eye sees the open heaven, The heart is intoxicated with bliss; O that the beautiful time of young love Could remain green forever."

"Virtue is no empty echo."

"Man is created free, and is free, Though he be born in chains."

"Wouldst thou know thyself, observe the actions of others. Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart."

"If thou canst not give pleasure to all by thy deeds and thy knowledge Give it then, unto the few; many to please is but in vain."

"What the inner voice says Will not disappoint the hoping soul."

"What one refuses in a minute No eternity will return."

"Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht."

"There are three lessons I would write, — Three words — as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light Upon the hearts of men. Have Hope. Though clouds environ now, And gladness hides her face in scorn, Put thou the shadow from thy brow, — No night but hath its morn. Have Faith. Where'er thy bark is driven, — The calm's disport, the tempest's mirth, — Know this: God rules the hosts of heaven, The habitants of earth. Have Love. Not love alone for one, But men, as man, thy brothers call; And scatter, like the circling sun, Thy charities on all. Thus grave these lessons on thy soul, — Hope, Faith, and Love, — and thou shalt find Strength when life's surges rudest roll, Light when thou else wert blind."

"Votes should be weighed, not counted. Sooner or later, the state will be wrecked In which majority rules, and ignorance decides."

"The lemonade is weak, like your soul."

"Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?"

"The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself."

"To save all we must risk all."

"I feel an army in my fist."

"For Schiller, freedom means precisely the absence of constraint, not only physical but also moral; because even duty constrains us painfully when it conflicts with sensible impulse, as in Kantian rigorism. Aesthetic freedom for Schiller is something more than moral freedom: the latter would indeed be a liberation from sensible impulses, but it would place us under the rule of a law imposed on our human nature. Aesthetic freedom also frees us from the suffering of this constraint, making us feel that ethical law is in accordance with our natural inclination."

"In Kant's troubled criticism, there is all the torment of Christianity; in his theory of radical evil, the dogma of original sin persists, however philosophically transfigured. Schiller rightly wrote to Goethe: “There is always something in Kant, as in Luther, that reminds us of the monk who, even after leaving the cloister, cannot erase its traces from himself.” (from “'Logos”', II issue, p. 113)"

"Friedrich Schiller, accepting Kant's legacy of the intelligible self and the sensible self, distinguishes two aspects that we can only divide abstractly in human beings and on which our analysis must stop: the person, who remains constant, and his or her changing states. (from “'Logos”', II fascicle p. 110)"

"In the middle of the war there was Heine, there was Goethe, there was Schiller. I did posters for the German club, in the middle of the war. When I think back to how happy I was, studying German and flunking algebra, and I think what was going on for other Jewish teenagers on the other side of the world, I'm so puzzled by those dates."

"Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves it as a fly in a glue bottle. His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakespeare's endless rhythms! … There is a nimiety — a too-muchness — in all Germans. It is the national fault. Lessing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable."

"His Armies, weakened by defeat and defeat, dispirited by misfortune, had unlearned - under beaten generals - that warlike impetuosity which as it is the consequence, so it is the guarentee of success."

"Self Confidence has always been the parent of great actions."

"Law can only be applied to foreseeable cases."

"In circumstances where the law of force prevails, where security depends on power alone, the weakest party is naturally the most busy to place itself in a posture of defense."

"All men without distinction, are allured by immediate advantages. Great minds alone are excited by distant good. So long as wisdom in it's projects, calculates upon wisdom, or relies upon its own strength, it forms none by chimerical schemes - and runs the risk of making itself the laughter of the world. But it is certain of success, and can reckon upon aid and admiration, when it finds a place in it's plans for barbarism, rapacity and superstition and can render the selifsh passions of mankind the executor of its' purposes."

"Fortune, which had never forsaken him in his lifetime, favored the King of Sweden even in his death, with the rare privilege of falling in the fullness of his glory and an untarnished fame. By a timely death, his protecting genius rescued him from the inevitable fate of man - that of forgetting moderation in the intoxication of success, and justice in the plenitude of power."

"It is an unfailing maxim, that if policy enjoins an act of violence, its execution must never be entrusted to the violent."

"Even the strongest minds cannot, with impunity, defy the prejudices of the age."

"Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation."

"I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, — through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo."

"The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its Creator—permit me to use this human simile—the first duty of all thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the structure to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there is only one appearance in nature—the thinking being. The great compound called the world is only remarkable to me because it is present to shadow forth symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself understandable to intelligence—the alphabet by means of which all spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another. Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they transport me into the active state of their author, of their possessor, because they betray the presence of a rational and feeling Being, and let me perceive my relationship with that Being."

"Truth suffers no loss if a vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way that virtue and religion suffer no detriment if a criminal denies them."

"Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom."

"The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the condition in which their birth has placed then."

"The reason passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual."