A woman who could always love would never grow old; and the love of mother and wife would often give or preserve many charms if it were not too often combined with parental and conjugal anger. There remains in the face of women who are naturally serene and peaceful, and of those rendered so by religion, an after-spring, and later an after-summer, the reflex of their most beautiful bloom.
Jean PaulThe gymnasium of running, walking on stilts, climbing, etc. stells and makes hardy single powers and muscles, but dancing, like a corporeal poesy, embellishes, exercises, and equalizes all the muscles at once.
Jean PaulWith so many thousand joys, is it not black ingratitude to call the world a place of sorrow and torment?
Jean PaulNations and men are only the best when they are the gladdest, and deserve heaven when they enjoy it.
Jean PaulIt has been jestingly said that the works of John Paul Richter are almost unintelligible to any but the Germans, and even to some of them. A worthy German, just before Richter's death, edited a complete edition of his works, in which one particular passage fairly puzzled him. Determined to have it explained at the source, he went to John Paul himself. The author's reply was very characteristic: "My good friend, when I wrote that passage, God and I knew what it meant; it is possible that God knows it still; but as for me, I have totally forgotten."
Jean Paul