He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate ... can look fortune in the face.

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate, and set proud death beneath his feet, can look fortune in the face, unbending both to good and bad; his countenance unconquered.

Man is so constituted that he then only excels other things when he knows himself.

Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it - even if we so desired.

Whose happiness is so firmly established that he has no quarrel from any side with his estate of life?

I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.

...Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.