You ardently strive for freedom, and I do wish you were free--but, rather than for your sake, so that government won't be.

I've never been on good terms with God, but now I'm becoming His intimate, for He is truly absolute and extremely legitimate.

Profundity easily turns into dullness and astuteness deteriorates into wit. Be guided by natural common sense and it will accommodate great and small.

Schiller moves upward. Goethe comes from up above.

When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.

As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.

Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We're progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.