The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.

He only is a well-made man who has a good determination.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior...

The best of life is conversation.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.