Jean Paul Quotes

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.

How alone everyone is in the vast tomb of the universe!

Sprecht nicht: wir wollen leiden; denn ihr müßt. Sprecht aber: wir wollen handeln; denn ihr müßt nicht.

Courage consists, not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing and conquering it.

The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven.

Die Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies, aus welchem wir nicht getrieben werden können.

The Fates and Furies, as well as the Graces and Sirens, glide with linked hands over life.

Thus our actual path in life, as well as the course of our ideas, is often indicated by accident; the continuance only, and establishment of the one or the other, is dependent on our free will.

Wer nicht zuweilen zu viel empfindet, der empfindet immer zu wenig.

The last, best fruit that comes to perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard; forbearance toward the unforbearing; warmth of heart toward the cold; and philanthropy toward the misanthropic.

When Antipater demanded fifty children as hostages from the Spartans, they offered him, in their stead, a hundred men of distinction; unlike ordinary educators, who precisely reverse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly and nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands before us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised land, may only gaze, but not enter.

No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God. With an orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of fathers, he stands mourning by the immeasurable corpse of nature, no longer moved and sustained by the Spirit of the universe.

Memory is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away.

The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.

"the flute is the true magical rod that changes all it touches in the inward world; an enchanter's wand at which the secret depths of the soul open. The inward world is the true world," said Vult; "the moonlight that shines into our hearts."