The daguerreotype stands testimony against the delusional opinion that art is an imitation of nature. Nature alone in this case provides evidence for how little he understands art, how pitiful everything turns out for him when he takes up art.
A lady is that being who begins to be no longer young.
Children are younger than we are, they still remember how they too were trees and birds, and therefore are still able to understand them; we are too old, we have too many worries, and our heads are full of jurisprudence and poor quality lyrics.
In love there is no yesterday, love does not think of tomorrow. She tends greedily towards today, but this day she needs all, absolute, fulfilled.
Anyone can be virtuous in solitude; vices always need two.
Kindness always beats beauty.
Debts take the place of ancient destiny in the national tragedies of our times.
It is enough for him to see that one denies the existence of God, that a strange uneasiness, a melancholy dread seizes me, as I felt then, in New Bedlam in London, when, surrounded by a crowd of madmen, I lost sight of the guide. "God is all there is" and any denial of Him means denial of life, means death.
It is amazing that Xanthippe's husband could become such a great philosopher. He went through so many disputes - you can still think! But he could not write, it was impossible for him: not a single book remained from Socrates.
The only beauty I know is health.
Should the whole of Europe become a total prison, there would remain a gate of escape: this is America, and, thank God, the gate is greater than the prison itself.
If the great passion takes possession of us for the second time in life, we unfortunately no longer have the same confidence in its immortality...
If God rightly claims first place in creative activity, then Shakespeare surely deserves second place.
If we give any preference to Goethe over Schiller, it is only because of the insignificant fact that Goethe, if he had been asked to depict in his work in detail a poet, would have been able to describe him on Frederick Schiller with all his Thieves, Piccolominis, Louises, Maries, and Maidens.
If your eye leads you into temptation, pluck it out. If your hand leads you into temptation, cut it off. If your tongue leads you into temptation, bite it. And if your thinking tempts you, become a Catholic.
If a person wants to shoot themselves, they have every reason to do so. But does he know these reasons? - here is the question. Until the last minute we are the victims of our own comedy. Dying of heartache, we complain of toothache.
There are things between heaven and earth which neither philosophers nor the commonest of fools are able to understand.
There is a humor of ideas, a mingling of thoughts which have never before met with each other in the head of man—the civil marriage of jest and wisdom.
The railway destroys the space.
Woman's hatred is actually the same love, only in the opposite sense.
The woman is an apple and a snake at the same time.
Women know only one way to make us happy and thirty thousand ways to make us miserable.
Women make history, although history only remembers the names of men.
After fat cattle come thin, after thin comes a complete lack of beef.
It has been observed that clerics all over the world - rabbis, muftis, Dominicans, consistory councilors, popes, bonzis, in short, the whole diplomatic corps of God - are characterized by a family-like air typical of people in the same occupations.
Then Liszt interpreted Berlioz's "March to Execution," a grand opus, which, if I am not mistaken, was composed by the young musician on the morning of his wedding day.
From hating the nationalists, I am almost ready to love the communists.
The image on the coin - an object that is not indifferent in politics. Because people love money so much and contemplate it with love, children often take on the features of that monarch whose face is engraved on the coin, and the poor monarch comes to be suspected of being the father of his subjects.
The Iliad, Plato, the battle of Marathon, Moses, venus Strasbourg Cathedral, the French Revolution, Hegel, ships, etc. - all these are successful ideas in God's creative dream. But the time will come when God will wake up, sleepily sneeze, and the world will melt away without a trace, or, whatever is possible, never even existed.
Sometimes it seems to me that the heads of the French are like their cafes, entirely covered with mirrors inside, so that every idea that comes into their heads is reflected countless times: an optical device, through which the most limited and poor heads are presented as the richest and most brilliant. These heads, like the glittering cafes, completely dazzle the poor Germans when they first come to Paris.