Children, love one another, and if that is not possible-at least try to put up with one another.

What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance.

Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Energy will do anything that can be done in the world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged animal a man without it.

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.