A person who looks different all the time frightens me. Only one animal changes its skin: the snake.

The art of acting presupposes three phases: understanding a part, intuiting a part, and contemplating the essence of a part.

Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.

A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.

Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.

As far as the arts and the sciences are concerned, the German mind appreciates most highly that which it does not understand of the latter, and that which it does not enjoy of the former.

They are miserly, the princes of Austria, you need not grieve about it; they may not donate anything, but they allow themselves tobe fleeced, the good lords.