Friedrich Schiller Quotes

Man is never so authentically himself than when at play.

God helps the brave

You could be happy without me - but not become unhappy through me. This I felt alive in me - and thereupon I built my hopes. You could give yourself to another, but none could love you more purely or more completely than I did. To none could your happiness be holier, as it was to me, and always will be. My whole existence, everything that lives within me, everything, my most precious, I devote to you, and if I try to ennoble myself, that is done, in order to become ever worthier of you, to make you ever happier.

The dignity of mankind is in your hands; protect it!
It sinks with you! With you it will ascend.

All powerful souls have kindred with each other.

It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man. Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled.

Wenn ich bei dir bin, zerschmilzt meine Vernunft in einen Blick - in einen Traum von dir, wenn ich weg bin.

But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age which besets him on all sides?

While the gods remained more human, the men were more divine.

Who reflects too much will accomplish little.

The concrete life of the individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of the whole may drag out its sorry existence.

Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.

The man of courage thinks not of himself. Help the oppressed and put thy trust in God.

When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.

There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.