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

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

When I walk up the piazza of Santa Croce I feel as if it were not a Florentine nor an European church but a church built by and for the human race.

The height, the deity of man is to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. Society is good when it does not violate me, but best when it is likest to solitude.

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds.