Friedrich Schiller Quotes

"Wenn es immer nach deinem Kopf ginge, du kröchest dein Leben lang im Staub." - "Immer noch besser, als ich kröch um den Thron herum."

Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last! Loitering slow, the Future creepeth — Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth — And motionless forever stands the Past.

Don't let your heart depend on things
That ornament life in a fleeting way!
He who possesses, let him learn to lose,
He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.

The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.

Truth suffers no loss if a vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way that virtue and religion suffer no detriment if a criminal denies them.

Wer tränen ernten will, muss Liebe säen.

The iron chain and the silken cord are both equally bonds.

It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissable, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

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.

I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, — through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

Alles wiederholt sich nur im Leben,
Ewig jung ist nur die Phantasie;
Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,
Das allein veraltet nie!

What the inner voice says
Will not disappoint the hoping soul.

What's old collapses, times change,
And new life blossoms in the ruins.

The empire of Saturnus is gone by; Lord of the secret birth of things is he; Within the lap of earth, and in the depths Of the imagination dominates; And his are all things that eschew the light. The time is o'er of brooding and contrivance, For Jupiter, the lustrous, lordeth now, And the dark work, complete of preparation, He draws by force into the realm of light. Now must we hasten on to action, ere The scheme, and most auspicious positure Parts o'er my head, and takes once more its flight, For the heavens journey still, and adjourn not.