Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.

No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.

There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.

Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We're progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.

Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.

Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses.

It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.

If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept.

If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.

Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.

When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.