Friedrich Schiller Quotes

Death is a mighty mediator. There all the flames of rage are extinguished, hatred is appeased, and angelic pity, like a weeping sister, bends with gentle and close embrace over the funeral urn.

A pity about the people! they are brave enough comrades, but they have heads like a soapboiler's.

Time is a blooming field: nature is ever teeming with life: and all is seed, and all is fruit.

Man, one may say, was never in such a completely animal condition; but he has, on the other hand, never escaped from it.

Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.

I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Not without a shudder may the human hand reach into the mysterious urn of destiny.

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.

Without a home must the soldier go, a changeful wanderer, and can warm himself at no home-lit hearth.

You have to go the rounds from individual to individual in order to gather the totality of the race.

The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the condition in which their birth has placed then.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.

Against stupidity, God Himself fights in vain.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Many a smiling face hides a mourning heart; but grief alone teaches us what we are.

Not he who scorns the Saviour's yoke Should wear his cross upon the heart.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine.

What the inner voice says will not disappoint the hoping soul.

Only the soldier is a free man, because he can look death in the face.

Emulation is a noble and just passion, full of appreciation.

The first great law is to obey.

In the society, where people are just parts in a larger machine, individuals are unable to develop fully.

Art is the right hand of Nature.

Obedience is the Christian's crown.

O jealousy! thou magnifier of trifles.

While the womanly god demands our veneration, the godlike woman kindles our love; but while we allow ourselves to melt in the celestial loveliness, the celestial self-sufficiency holds us back in awe.

Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing.

Great souls suffer in silence.

You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.

The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.

The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty.

Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

Let him that sows the serpent's teeth not hope to reap a joyous harvest. Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, its own avenging angel,--dark misgivings at the inmost heart.

Every man stamps his value on himself... man is made great or small by his own will.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.

The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.

Yes great people are always subject to persecution and always getting into straits.

Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.

Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty which is the basis, the principle, and the unity of the beautiful.

Satisfy a few to please many is bad.

To save all we must risk all.

A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.

Most gladly would I give the blood-stained laurel for the first violet which March brings us, the fragrant pledge of the new-fledged year.

Truth is more than a dream and a song.

He who neglects the present moment throws away all he has.