A.R. Von Quotes

The most damaging prejudice consists of banning any kind of investigation of nature.

If one mistreats citizens of foreign countries, one infringes upon one's duty toward one's own subjects; for thus one exposes themto the law of retribution.

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

What is the universal? The single case. What is the particular? Millions of cases.

Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.

Architecture is crystallized music.

Let us live, while we are alive!

We rather confess our moral errors, faults, and crimes than our ignorance.

We should know mankind better if we were not so anxious to resemble one another.

Over all the mountain tops is peace.

The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.

This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.

Art is a mediator of the unspeakable.

What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.

And step by step, along the path of life, There's nothing true but Heaven.

There is no remedy but love for the great superiority of others

If all these devils really exist it proves there must be angels, too.

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate.

What man does not know, Or has not thought of, Wanders in the night Through the labyrinth of the mind.

When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.

Art rests on a kind of religious sense, on a deep, steadfast earnestness; and on this account it unites so readily with religion.

Happy contractedness of youth, nay, of mankind in general, that they think neither of the high nor the deep, of the true nor the false, but only of what is suited to their own conceptions.

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

The hardest thing is to see what's under your very eyes.

The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.

A state of true and universal tolerance is best ensured by leaving alone the peculiarities of men and peoples.

What sort of God would it be, who only pushed from without.

The important thing is not to know more than all men, but to know more at each moment than any particular man.

Let us seek to fathom those things that are fathomable and reserve those things which are unfathomable for reverence in quietude.

That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.

A phenomenon like Mozart remains an inexplicable thing.

Enthusiasm is of the greatest value, so long as we are not carried away by it.

The world only goes forward because of those who oppose it.

The soul of man is like to water; from Heaven it cometh, to Heaven it riseth And then returning to earth, forever alternating.

America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.

An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor.

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.

Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.

We have time enough if we but use it aright

Character is constructed amidst the tempests of the World

Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.

Well-mannered children could be conceived if the parents were well-mannered.

No limit, no definition, may restrict the range or depth of the human spirit's passage into its own secrets or the world's.

In art it's not the thinking that does the job, but making.

When one is polite in German, one lies.

I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe.

I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one.

Most pioneers are at the mercy of doubt at the beginning, whether of their worth, of their theories, or of the whole enigmatic field in which they labour.

Win for yourself that which your fathers have won.

Higher yet and higher out of clouds and night, nearer yet and nearer rising to the light - light, serene and holy where my soul may rest, purified and lowly, sanctified and blest.