Franz grillparzer quotes

At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.

Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.

North and West have always vied for power and territory, but their recent competition as to which one is more insidious of the twohas been more peaceful.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

I notice well that one stray step from the habitual path leads irresistibly into a new direction. Life moves forward, it never reverses its course.

Woman is the crown of all creation, but Man is the head who wears it, and even the servant is master in his house.

The Germans believe that, no matter where, they can get by on knowledge alone. Art, however, requires skill.

Transcendence: that which transcends experience.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.

Do not push so fast ahead, do slow down a bit! Otherwise you won't catch up with yourselves.

Disregard for the consequences and for right and wrong nowadays passes as energy.

Never expect any recognition here--the system prohibits it. The cross is not affixed to the genius, no, the genius is affixed to the cross.

Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.

The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.

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

If someone took the finest marble and knew how to shape it artfully: Prometheus' material was lowly clay, but his statues walked.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

He who takes people for smart pays an expensive lesson.

Praised be the good willing women who understand and take part in the fun--the body is an exacting beater, and even the heart is made of flesh.

Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.

Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.

Do you call the jewel blind, because your eye is?

Plato calls complacency the companion of loneliness.

People of talent resemble a musical instrument more closely than they do a musician. Without outside help, they produce not a single sound, but given even the slightest touch, and a magnificent tune emanates from them.

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

A cure by regression is homeopathic, like healing the damage done by ministers and ignorance with stupidity and Jesuits.

Love! Hate! Is there no third?

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

Lap-dogs and blood-hounds enjoy the greatest respect at court; house-dogs and no dogs at all are not even considered.

I'd wish the government took honest people into consideration, it shows enough consideration for scoundrels.

Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?

They are miserly, the princes of Austria, you need not grieve about it; they may not donate anything, but they allow themselves tobe fleeced, the good lords.

I cannot be exacting because I respect myself.

Drive the women from the bed just as you drove them from the choir; a eunuch sings in Rome, and the priests masturbate.

How can you say that love is blind? Keener than a young eagle's is its sight.

Freedom requires guns.

What are the characteristics of today's world so that one may recognize it by them?" It pays pensions and borrows money: credit and monuments.

When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.

The likeness of the world? A shadow! And world's glory? A dream!

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

The prince exults whomever he selects as his consort, but the queen, rather than elevating the subject of her choice, humiliates him as a man. By all that is right, a man is not intended to be the husband of his wife, but a woman is to be her husband's wife.

Pity, but never love bestows kind words upon the slave.

Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers--his hopes.

I understand the phrase "Honor the Women" all too well: the poet has probably a wife of his own, but he prefers to honor another.

It is fair to despise a cowardly man, but the female sex is strongest when it's weak.

Is it true that one travels in order to know mankind? It is easier to get to know other people at home, but abroad one gets to know oneself.

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

Prose talks and poetry sings.

In order to succeed in a profession, a person not only needs to have its good, but also its bad qualities. The former are the spirit, the latter is the body of the job.

Feeling and thinking are actually the blind man who carries the lame.

Grief, first take on shape! what is shapeless causes fear and torment but when the enemy materializes, half the victory is won.

Gold schenkt die Eitelkeit, der rauhe Stolz, Die Freundschaft und die Liebe schenken Blumen. Gold is the gift of vanityand pride, Friendship and love offer flowers.

Let the will embrace the highest ideals freely and with infinite strength, but let action first take hold of what lies closest.

The first indication of a young person's growing smarter is that he no longer understands the things which he used to consider quite intelligible and self-evident.

Right and proof are two crutches for everything bent and crooked that limps along.

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

What's the meaning of all the pious clamor, condemning cocks and hens? Those who have no teeth are the greatest meat-haters.

As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.

Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.

No matter which word it is, when I pronounce repeatedly, it ends up sounding utterly ridiculous and meaningless to me.

Who could deny that our Austria is richer than any other country? As the saying goes: "We have money like manure.

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

Since love is folly, a foolish woman is more dangerous than a wise one.

You can make the best of it and be content, or you can complain, it makes no difference. What does it matter that human beings judge the things that exist?

The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved.

What a pathetic creature is man! His senses are awakened by the hope for the very thing whose consummation puts him to sleep.

A woman's passion is not the measure of a man's love.

Those whom the gods chose as their property must not consort with mortals.

In the long run, only woman remains true to mankind's foremost mission. Whatever she achieves, she achieves through herself, and alone. Man's master is the--public.

The courts used to be, fair and square, the avengers of secular crimes; but nowadays they demand respect even for the criminal.

Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.

Those who want to row on the ocean of human knowledge do not get far, and the storm drives those out of their course who set sail.

Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.

The cradle of the future is the grave of the past.

Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.

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.

It is not a matter of desire, but of coercion and duty.

The sun of a prince's good graces resembles that in the skies in that it shines most kindly upon the blackest people.

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

The most irascible person is most likely to become apathetic in dangerous situations.

The course of modern learning leads from humanism via nationalism to bestiality.

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

In certain countries, people seem to be think that three asses together make one intelligent person. However, that is completely wrong. Several asses in concreto make the ass in abstracto and that is a most terrifying animal.

Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!

Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.

A love that dies has never lived.

The real genres: good and bad.

The office of the prince and that of the writer are defined and assigned as follows: the nobleman gives rank to the written work,the writer provides food for the prince.

The graceful flowers of innocence are more valuable than the laurel crown of fame.

If only it were God's will that printed and written materials have as much influence on the people as the princes and their censors fear! Considering the countless good books we have, the world would have changed for the better a long time ago.

I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else.

You say I'm small? I certainly can relate, although it is a matter of perspective. The distance is deceptive, my friend, you standtoo low.

The military and the clergy cause us much annoyance; the clergy and the military, they empty our wallets and rob our intelligence.

Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.

History is the zoology of the human race.

Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.

Servants honor their master by their service.

Someone who is reluctant to say what he needs to say, often ends up doing so with an insolence whose crassness is proportionate tohis fear, once he gathers the necessary courage.

Captivating the spirit of the age is a matter of great talent; being swept away by it characterizes an average mind. The two are as different from one another as activity and passivity.

I would love to be able to write a tragedy in my imagination--it would turn into a masterpiece.

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

Soon there will be nothing truly profound that is not achieved by everyone, and of the difficult things in this world only one will be left: simplicity.

Erroneous views and presumptuousness send a talent to the insane asylum.

Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground.

Let no one say that taking action is hard. Action is aided by courage, by the moment, by impulse, and the hardest thing in the world is making a decision.

Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army's strength is the foot soldiers.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

It is good insofar as it is not evil.

Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.

Mozart starved, but you allow Thalberg and Liszt make tons of gold: Of course, you may think that someone immortal cannot die of hunger

An uprising would punish only the country, and that is out of the question. But there is yet another approach, the most effectiveform of resistance: contemptuous compliance.

Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.

How great seems human progress when we consider where it began, and how insignificant, when we contemplate the goals for which itstrives.

Es binden Sklavenfesseln nur die H a« nde, Der Sinn, er macht den Freien und den Knecht. The chains of slavery can only bind the hands. The mind makes us either free or enslaved.

Why do villains have so much influence? Because the honest people are terribly dense.

Gratitude is a fickle thing, indeed. A person taking aim presses the weapon to his chest and cheek, but when he hits, he discardsit with indifference.

I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself.

The thing that pleases is not always good and, helas, the good thing does not always please.

Our age believed herself pregnant with auspicious progeny, but when her hour came, it turned out to be dropsy.

Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.

A person who looks different all the time frightens me. Only one animal changes its skin: the snake.

Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!