All Quotes

"He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times."

"Life is earnest, art is gay."

"Whatever is not forbidden is permitted."

"What is the short meaning of the long speech?"

"Der Krieg ernährt den Krieg."

"My son, there's nothing insignificant, Nothing! But yet in every earthly thing First and most principal is place and time."

"People read me but they don't subscribe."

"For words divide and rend; But silence is most noble till the end."

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and watery depths, — all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason."

"In thy breast are the stars of thy fate."

"You say it as you understand it."

"When the wine goes in, strange things come out."

"The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate."

"The hat is the pride of man; for he who cannot keep his hat on before kings and emperors is no free man."

"The empire of Saturnus is gone by; Lord of the secret birth of things is he; Within the lap of earth, and in the depths Of the imagination dominates; And his are all things that eschew the light. The time is o'er of brooding and contrivance, For Jupiter, the lustrous, lordeth now, And the dark work, complete of preparation, He draws by force into the realm of light. Now must we hasten on to action, ere The scheme, and most auspicious positure Parts o'er my head, and takes once more its flight, For the heavens journey still, and adjourn not."

"Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse."

"I have only an office here, and no opinion."

"Virtue has her heroes too As well as Fame and Fortune."

"Many a crown shines spotless now That yet was deeply sullied in the winning."

"The world is narrow, broad the mind— Thoughts dwell easily side by side Things collide violently in space"

"There's no such thing as chance; And what to us seems merest accident Springs from the deepest source of destiny."

"What is life without the radiance of love?"

"Time is man's angel."

"The strong man is strongest when alone."

"Wir wollen sein ein einzig Volk von Brüdern, in keiner Not uns trennen und Gefahr. Wir wollen frei sein, wie die Väter waren, eher den Tod, als in der Knechtschaft leben. Wir wollen trauen auf den höchsten Gott und uns nicht fürchten vor der Macht der Menschen."

"The mountain cannot frighten one who was born on it."

"Who reflects too much will accomplish little."

"You saw his weakness, and he will never forgive you."

"This feat of Tell, the archer, will be told While yonder mountains stand upon their base. By heaven! The apple's cleft right through the core."

"No cause has he to say his doom is harsh, Who's made the master of his destiny."

"What's old collapses, times change, And new life blossoms in the ruins."

"A gloomy guest fits not a wedding feast."

"The most pious man can't stay in peace If it doesn't please his evil neighbor."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"After all these years I had the privilege of naming my private part, because we all have nicknames. So I named my private part Pride. It's not much, but at least I have my Pride."

"I'm on performance enhancing drugs, so I may cause drowsiness."

"I went to a urologist. He told me I could go at any time."

"My father would take me to the playground, and put me on mood swings."

"I wanted to join the Army. The sign said "Be all that you can be." They told me it wasn't enough."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord."

"Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection... Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence."

"This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity."

"Darwin himself told us in his last book (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms) that we should never underestimate the power of worms on the move. ...The inversion of a humble worm, especially when disturbed, may bring down empires. Shakespeare told us that "the smallest worm will turn being trodden on." And Cervantes wrote in his author's preface to Don Quixote that "even a worm when trod upon, will turn again." …Geoffrey, it seems, was correct after all - not in every detail, of course, but at least in basic vision and theoretical meaning. And the triumph of surprise, the inversion of nuttiness to apparent truth, stands as a premier example of the most exciting general development in evolutionary theory during our times."

"We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes; and we can trace the products of these genes (enzymes and proteins) as they influence the course of embryology. In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies."