A.R. Von Quotes

What use is it that knowledge mounts? It's knowing something good that counts.

With these men and women who work-for the cause with all their hearts, with cool heads and skilled hands we will master every fate.

The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.

St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.

In the beginning there was rhythm.

He who helps in the saving of others, saves himself as well.

Every day, we are assassinating nearly 16,000 additional victims.

Indolent people, whatever taste they may have for society, seek eagerly for pleasure, and find nothing. They have an empty head and seared hearts.

News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to communicate what they have just learned.

A good name will wear out; a bad one may be turned; a nickname lasts forever.

We never read without profit if with the pen or pencil in our hand we mark such ideas as strike us by their novelty, or correct those we already possess.

To the person with a firm purpose all men and things are servants.

Man's highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.

Tolerance should really be only a temporary attitude; it must lead to recognition. To tolerate means to offend.

We cannot and must not get rid of nor deny our characteristics. But we can give them shape and direction.

How many years must a man do nothing, before he can at all know what is to be done and how to do it!

Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.

Death is Nature's expert advice to get plenty of Life.

If you inquire what people are like here, I must answer, "The same as everywhere."

It is only necessary to grow old to become more charitable and even indulgent. I see no fault committed by others that I have not committed myself.

Prudent and active men, who know their strength and use it with limit and circumspection, alone go far in the affairs of the world.

We don't get to know anything but what we love.

Who is the happiest man? He who is alive to the merit of others, and can rejoice in their enjoyment as if it were his own.

Originality provokes originality.

You don't love if you don't take the beloved's faults for virtues.

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

What one has wished for in youth, in old age one has in abundance.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

We are forced to participate in the games of life before we can possibly learn how to use the options in the rules governing them.

Music is so elevated that it is beyond the reach of intellect and there flows from it an influence which is all-potent, and which noone can explain.

The most difficult thing is what is thought to be the simplest; to really see the things which are before your eyes.

There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do anything worth doing.

My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.

Mannerism always wants to be finished and doesn't enjoy the process. Genuine, truly great talent, however, finds its greatest satisfaction in the production.

Just begin and the mind grows heated; continue, and the task will be completed!

We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all.

Beware of wishing for anything in youth, because you will get it in middle age.

Daily life is more instructive than the most effective book.

Every need whose true satisfaction is denied leads by necessity to faith.

You are, when all is done-just what you are.

Give me those days with heart in riot, The depths of bliss that touched on pain, The force of hate, and love's disquiet- Ah, give me back my youth again!

Oh happy he who still can hope in our day to breathe the truth while plunged in seas of error! What we don't know is really what we need, and what we know is of no use to us whatever!

The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

He who does not see the whole world in his friends, does not deserve that the world should hear of him.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.