Great Throughts Treasury

"Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him."

"Oaks shall be rent; the Word shall shatter ? Yea, on that fiery day, the Crown, even the palace walls shall totter, and domes and spires come crashing down."

"Of course God will forgive me; that's His job."

"Of the flat-skulled, wide-mouthed, Laplanders, so dirty and so small; who bake their fish on the embers, and cower, and shake, and squall. The maidens listened earnestly, at last the tales were ended; the ship was gone, the dusky night had on our talk descended."

"Of the giant trees of Ganges,"

"Of the seaman's anxious life?"

"Oh what lies lurk in kisses!"

"Oh what lies there are in kisses! And their guile so well prepared! Sweet the snaring is; but this is sweeter still, to be ensnared."

"Oh, fair, oh sweet and holy as dew at morning tide, I gaze on thee, and yearnings, sad in my bosom hide."

"One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged."

"Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid."

"Our death is in the cool of night, our life is in the pool of day. The darkness glows, I?m drowning, the day has tired me with light. Over my head in leaves grown deep, sings the young nightingale. It only sings of love there, I hear it in my sleep."

"Out of my own great woe I make my little songs."

"People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."

"Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling, and breathe forth their sweetest odors. Flow forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond these mountains the dear one of my dreams!"

"Phychical pain is more easily borne than physical; and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former."

"Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men, and rocks them up to manhood; and this meager foster-mother remains their faithful companion throughout life"

"Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume."

"Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies."

"Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent."

"Sleep is good, death is better, but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all."

"Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle."

"So we keep asking, over and over, until a handful of earth stops our mouths ? but is that an answer?"

"Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistible force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts."

"Starless and cold is the night: the sea is foaming, and over the sea, flat on his belly, lies the formless wind from the north, in secret, grumbling furtively, like a grumpy misery back in good humor, chattering gaily to the waters, telling many mad stories, stories of giants, miraculous slayings, the ancient sagas of Norway. In between, he smiles and howls till the echoes are heard of the old magic spells of the Edda, and runic rhymes, so mystical, so magically powerful, that the white children of the waves spring up and dance for joy, wildly drunk. Meanwhile, along the sea-shore, over the wave-washed sand, a stranger walks, with a step wilder still than the wind and waves. Where he treads fire flashes, mussels crack; he wraps himself in his grey cloak and swiftly goes through the hurrying night ? surely lit by the little light that shimmers and glimmers so gloriously from the fisherman?s lonely hut. Father and brother are on the sea and quiet alone in the hut remains the fisherman?s daughter, the fisherman?s beautiful daughter. She sits by the hearth, and listen to the kettle, with its sweet whistle, and throws the crackling brushwood upon the fire, and blows upon it, so that red flickering lights magically shine upon the angelic face, and on the delicate white shoulders, that lurk and peep out of the grey coarse chemise, and on her anxious little hands that cling so close about her skirt. Suddenly open the door springs, and enters in the stranger out of the night. Love-sure his eye rests upon the pale and trembling girl. He throws his coat upon the floor, and, smiling, says: ?you see, my child, I keep my word; I come, and with me comes the old times when the gods of the sky Came down to the daughters of men, and embraced the daughters of men, and from them begot a race of sceptred kings and heroes, wonders of the world. But be amazed no more, my child, because of my divinity, and please, make me some tea with rum. We also freeze, the immortal gods, easily catching a godly cold, and an immortal cough.?"

"Still is the night, it quiets the streets down, in that window my love would appear; she's long since gone away from this town, but this house where she lived still remains here. A man stands here too, staring up into space, and wrings his hands with the strength of his pain: it chills me, when I behold his pale face for the moon shows me my own features again! You spirit double, you specter with my face. Why do you mock my love-pain sot that tortured me here, here in this place so many nights, so long ago?"

"Strange men, and stranger customs."

"Sweet May hath come to love us, flowers, trees, their blossoms don; and through the blue heavens above us the very clouds move on."

"Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks."

"Tell me who first did kisses suggest? It was a mouth all glowing and blest; It kissed and it thought of nothing beside. The fair month of May was then in its pride, The flowers were all from the earth fast springing, The sun was laughing, the birds were singing."

"That those wild lands send forth?"

"That was only a prelude; where one burns books, one will also burn people. Eventually."

"The air grows cool and darkles, the Rhine flows calmly on; the mountain summit sparkles in the light of the setting sun."

"The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. Ah! the world, that cruel step-mother, beats the poor child the harder to make him shed more pearls."

"The beauteous eyes of the spring's fair night with comfort are downward gazing."

"The Blossoms and leaves in plenty From the apple tree fall each day; The merry breezes approach them, And with them merrily play."

"The eyes of spring, so azure, are peeping from the ground; they are the darling violets, that I in nosegays bound."

"The foolish race of mankind are swarming below in the night; they shriek and rage and quarrel -- and all of them are right."

"The fountain of love is the rose and the lily, the sun and the dove."

"The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough."

"The future smells of Russian leather, of blood, of godlessness and of much whipping. I advise our grandchildren to come into the world with very thick skin on their backs."

"The gazelles so gentle and clever skip lightly in frolicsome mood."

"The German is like the slave who, without chains, obeys his masters merest word, his very glance. The condition of servitude is inherent in him, in his very soul and worse than the physical is the spiritual slavery. The Germans must be set free from wit."

"The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to portray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of K”nigsberg, an old town on the north-eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time, and the neighbors knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight-fitting coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue called after him to this day the Philosopher's Walk. Summer and winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain, the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudging anxiously behind Kant with a big umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. What a strange contrast did this man's outward life present to his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts! In sooth, had the citizens of K”nigsberg had the least presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt far more awful dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but kill the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him. ? Heinrich Heine"

"The latest light of evening upon the waters shone, and still we sat in the lonely hut, in silence and alone. The sea-fog grew, the screaming mew rose on the water's swell, and silently in her gentle eye gathered the tears and fell. I saw them stand on the lily hand, upon my knee I sank, and, kneeling there, from her fingers fair the precious dew I drank. And sense and power, since that sad hour, in longing waste away; ah me! I fear, in each witching tear some subtile poison lay."

"The lights in the lighthouse window?"

"The lotus flower is troubled at the sun's resplendent light; with sunken head and sadly she dreamily waits for the night."

"The more I get to know people, the more I like dogs."

"The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle."

"The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African; for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him."