Playwrights From Germany

"Der Krieg ernährt den Krieg."

"They have founded the whole structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to be combated and dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would think they were paying too dearly for a truth which begins by robbing them of all that has value in their sight. It would be necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth that was felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name."

"Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste."

"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."

"Lo, the dead shall rise to heaven! Brethren hail the blest decree; Every sin shall be forgiven, Hell forever cease to be!"

"We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissable, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?"

"Courage, ne'er by sorrow broken! Aid where tears of virtue flow; Faith to keep each promise spoken! Truth alike to friend and foe!"

"To the Gods we ne'er can render Praise for every good they grant; Let us, with devotion tender, Minister to grief and want. Quenched be hate and wrath forever, Pardoned be our mortal foe— May our tears upbraid him never, No repentance bring him low!"

"Sense of wrongs forget to treasure— Brethren, live in perfect love! In the starry realms above, God will mete as we may measure."

"Joy from truth's own glass of fire Sweetly on the searcher smiles; Lest on virtue's steeps he tire, Joy the tedious path beguiles. High on faith's bright hill before us, See her banner proudly wave! Joy, too, swells the angels' chorus,— Bursts the bondage of the grave!"

"The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged."

"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."

"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."

"He, that noble prize possessing— He that boasts a friend that's true, He whom woman's love is blessing, Let him join the chorus too!"

"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?"

"To save all we must risk all."

"Bow before Him, all creation! Mortals, own the God of love! Seek Him high the stars above,— Yonder is His habitation!"

"I feel an army in my fist."

"Welcome, all ye myriad creatures! Brethren, take the kiss of love!"

"Joy, thou spark from Heav'n immortal, Daughter of Elysium! Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing Goddess, to thy shrine we come. Thy sweet magic brings together What stern Custom spreads afar; All men become brothers Where thy happy wing-beats are."

"It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom."

"Be embraced, ye millions! This kiss is for the whole world! Brothers, above the arch of stars A loving Father surely dwells."

"Joy, in Nature's wide dominion, Mightiest cause of all is found; And 'tis joy that moves the pinion, When the wheel of time goes round"

"KING PHILIPP II: Can you establish some new creed to justify my bloody murder of my only son? GRAND INQUISITOR: To appease eternal justice and redeem us, God's own Son was killed on the wooden cross. KING: And can you spread this creed throughout all Europe? GRAND INQUISITOR: Far and wide, everywhere people worship the cross."

"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."

"Grosse Seelen dulden still."

"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."

"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)"

"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."

"A moment lived in paradise Is not atoned for too dearly by death."

"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."

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

"O the idea was childish, but divinely beautiful."

"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)"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Have faith! where'er thy bark is driven,— 'The calm's disport, the tempest's mirth,— Know this! God rules the host of heaven, The inhabitants of earth."

"Law can only be applied to foreseeable cases."

"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."