E. T. A. Hoffmann Quotes

How prone poor Humanity is to dam up the minutest remnants of its freedom, and build an artificial roof to prevent it looking up to the clear blue sky.

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

Knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry.

Once you are dancing with the devil, the prettiest capers won't help you.

It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass.

Think of the wonderful circles in which our whole being moves and from which we cannot escape no matter how we try. The circler circles in these circles.

From a chemist's point of view, the surface or interior of a star…is boring—there are no molecules there.

It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.

I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly.

Arms control has to have a future, or none of us does. But it doesn't necessarily have to come in big packages of 600-page treaties.

I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

One day I discovered that one could get the barrier to internal rotation in ethane approximately right using this method. This was the beginning of my work on organic molecules.

The early part of my career was the 1990s, and I was living in New York working as an actor. It was the world I was in. A lot of companies had a great deal of money.

Boys should not play with weapons more dangerous than they understand.

I am a teacher, and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates, and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry.

I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.

Human beings ought not to draw in their antennae at every ungentle touch, like supersensitive insects.

To pry into the secrets of this world, we must make experiments. But experiment is a clumsy instrument, afflicted with a fatal determinacy which destroys causality.

There is nothing more marvelous or madder than real life.

It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one's personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.

Theres plenty of great independent films to do, but you cant support yourself making independent film as an actress.

Not a single man on earth knows from his own experience the how and where of his birth, only from tradition, which is often very uncertain.

When people are struggling, thats a painful place to be in, to not know who you are and where you belong and what you desire.

Deep down, Erikson wants profoundly to be respected and admired - and very deep down he wants to be left alone.

No longer was light analogous to the discharge of a blunderbuss, but rather to the pulsating flight of birds.

I was never that famous, but I do think going to college and really getting away from the business and taking a true break is incredibly, incredibly important if you start acting at a young age.

I really enjoyed being on movie sets, and I had fun with the people, but I didn't really think about acting or care, or I didn't think I cared about acting.

I never made the choice to be an actor. It just sort of happened to me when I was a kid, for whatever reasons that are irrelevant in this moment.

I did act as a kid, but I quit when I was seventeen.

I think being on a set where people arent being treated as equals, and with just a common level of decency and respect, is really uncomfortable.

I curate my T.V.-watching quite carefully.

I dont watch a lot of T.V. I only watch things via Netflix, so I only watch the things that Im choosing to watch.

I know that the emotional narrative will work in the end, and I just have to play each moment honestly even if the getting from A to B doesn't totally make sense initially.

All my cousins steal things. Theyre just a bunch of thieves. My whole family is like that. You put something down for a second, and they steal it. You never see it again.

Going into my 20s, I was uncertain, trying to figure out what my relationship to acting is.

I always knew when I graduated from high school I’d go to college. I never thought about what I was walking away from . . . I just wanted to study literature and writing.

God, the world is so f - ked up, and we all have to do something about it.

I'm interested in acting because I'm interested in exploring humanity, and we're all nuts, we're all damaged, and we're all gorgeous, so anything less than that is dishonest to me.

Mozart's music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life.

Every year lays more earth upon us, which weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go under the earth at last.

It is true that writers often owe their most inspired thoughts, their most extraordinary phrases, to their generous typesetters, who assist their flights of fancy with so-called typographical errors.

It is only in the morning that one should marry, read unfavourable reviews, make one's will, beat one's servants, and so forth.

I don't think people should do things that they're not comfortable with, unless they want to stretch themselves in that way and challenge themselves.

That's something that rationally and logically I can't try to figure out, how somebody "transitions" so rapidly and so drastically, but I don't worry about it now.

I got into cooking and I went and cooked in Italy. I became a doula for a while. I built stone walls one summer, and I read a lot, and I swam a lot, and I spent a lot of time thinking.

I don't think there is anybody who's watching television right now who wants to see something because it looks good rather than feel something because it feels right or familiar or new or whatever.

Looking at somebody looking good is so... boring.

It's fun to play somebody who's kind of struggling.

Poor, ill-advised Roderich! What evil power did you conjure up to poison in its first youth the race you thought to have planted for eternity?

Nicole Richie invited me to her birthday party, and it was at Michael Jackson's Neverland!