Friedrich Schiller

Das Leben ist Nur ein Moment, der Tod ist auch nur einer!

Religious fanaticism anticipates even the remotest dangers. Enthusiasm never calculates its sacrifices.

Lo, the dead shall rise to heaven!
Brethren hail the blest decree;
Every sin shall be forgiven,
Hell forever cease to be!

Bei uns wird nur selten eine Mariage geschlossen, wo nicht wenigstens ein halb Dutzend der Gäste - oder der Aufwärter- das Paradies des Bräutigams geometrisch ermessen kann.

The lemonade is weak, like your soul.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other.

Pain is short, and joy is eternal.

In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.

The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its Creator—permit me to use this human simile—the first duty of all thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the structure to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there is only one appearance in nature—the thinking being. The great compound called the world is only remarkable to me because it is present to shadow forth symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself understandable to intelligence—the alphabet by means of which all spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another. Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they transport me into the active state of their author, of their possessor, because they betray the presence of a rational and feeling Being, and let me perceive my relationship with that Being.

O friends, no more these sounds!
Let us sing more cheerful songs, more full of joy!

Joy, in Nature's wide dominion,
Mightiest cause of all is found;
And 'tis joy that moves the pinion,
When the wheel of time goes round

Self Confidence has always been the parent of great actions.

He, that noble prize possessing—
He that boasts a friend that's true,
He whom woman's love is blessing,
Let him join the chorus too!

Be noble minded! Our own heart, and not other men's opinions of us, forms our true honor.

in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words.