Quotes

Here I have collected some of my favorite quotes, passages and principles that I adore for their significance and beauty. Many of them are originally in German, but I have decided to use English translations; it feels like they mesh better with the rest of the website and my life, since I spend most of my time in an English-speaking environment.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Who strives for greatness, must pull himself together;
Mastery is seen most clearly when constrained,
And law alone can give us freedom.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Without haste, but without rest.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Doubt grows with knowledge.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Desire transformation. Oh be aroused by the flame
Wherein the one thing that eludes you in change shines forth;
Every designing mind which has mastered the earthly
Loves in the figure's swing nothing more than the turning point.

What encloses itself in stasis, already is Rigidity;
Does it believe itself protected under the plain of gray?
Wait, from afar the hardest warns that which is hard.
Woe: the absent hammer is ready to strike!

Whoever pours forth as a spring, is recognized by Recognition;
And she leads him enraptured through all of cheerful creation
That often with opening closes and with ending begins.

Every happy space is child or grandchild of separation,
Which they undergo amazed. And the transfigured Daphne,
Now that she's laurel, wishes you change yourself into wind.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, XII Second Part)

We all live under the same sky, but we do not have the same horizon.
(Konrad Adenauer)

If I had to die now, I would say: "Was that all?"
And: "I don't quite understand it properly."
And: "It was rather loud"
(Kurt Tucholsky)

Happiness is the exercise of vital powers along the lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.
(Aristotle)

Love is made of courage.
(Nena)

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty.
But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
(Arthur Schopenhauer)

"Why, life happened to me." The Fire Chief shuts his eyes to remember. "Life. The usual. The same. The love that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father — a stampede of elephants, an onslaught of disease. And nowhere, nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff in the crumbling wall of the breaking dam to hold back the deluge, give or take a metaphor, lose or find a simile. And by the far edge of thirty, and near the rim of thirty-one, I picked myself up, every bone broken, every centimeter of flesh abraded, bruised, or scarred. I looked in the mirror and found an old man lost behind the frightened face of a young man, saw a hatred there for everything and anything, you name it, I'd damn it, and opened the pages of my fine library books and found what, what, what!?"
Montag guesses. "The pages where empty?"
"Bull's eye! Blank! Oh, the words were there, allright, but they ran over my eyes like hot oil, signifying nothing. Offering no help, no solace, no peace, no harbor, no true love, no bed, no light."
(Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)

Such circumstances brought me to the brink of despair,
and had well nigh made me put an end to my life:
nothing but my art held my hand.
Ah! It seemed to me impossible to quit the world
before I had produced all that I felt myself called to accomplish.
(Ludwig van Beethoven, Excerpt of Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament, October 6, 1802)