C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Heine
All special charter of freedom must be abrogated where the universal law of freedom is to flourish.
As the stars are the glory of the sky, so great men are the glory of their country, yea, of the whole earth. The hearts of great men are the stars of earth; and doubtless when one looks down from above upon our planet, these hearts are seen to send forth a silvery light just like the stars of heaven.
Communism possesses a language which every people can understand. Its elements are hunger, envy, death.
Every age has its problem, by solving which humanity is helped forward.
Everywhere that a great soul gives utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha.
Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time.
God has given us speech in order that we may say pleasant things to our friends, and tell bitter truths to our enemies.
He that marries is like the doge who was married to the Adriatic. He knows not what there is in that which he marries; mayhap treasures and pearls, mayhap monsters and tempests, await him.
He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave.
History shows that the majority of men who have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
I do not know that she was virtuous; but she was always ugly, and with a woman, that is half the battle.
In these days we fight for ideas, and newspapers are our fortresses.
It is an old story, yet remains ever new.
It is easy enough to forgive your enemies if you have not the means to harm them.
It is only kindred griefs that draw forth our tears, and each weeps really for himself.
Jests,—brain-fleas that jump about among the slumbering ideas.
Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Lyrical poetry is much the same in every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.
Man,—the aristocrat amongst the animals.
Mark this well, ye proud men of action! Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
Matrimony,—the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented.
Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet.
My heart resembles the ocean; has storm, and ebb and flow; and many a beautiful pearl lies hid in its depths below.
Newness hath an evanescent beauty.
No talent, but yet a character.
Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.
Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature’s grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.
Phychical pain is more easily borne than physical; and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.
Poverty sits by the cradle of all our great men, and rocks them up to manhood; and this meager foster-mother remains their faithful companion throughout life.
Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume.
Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.
Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistible force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracised by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts.
Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy—death.
The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. Ah! the world, that cruel step-mother, beats the poor child the harder to make him shed more pearls.
The fountain of love is the rose and the lily, the sun and the dove.
The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African; for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him.
The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: “It exists in spite of its ministers.”
There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare.
Those blue violets, her eyes.
Thought is invisible nature.
While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.
Yes, we ought to forgive our enemies, but not until they are hanged.
You should only attempt to borrow from those who have but few of this world’s goods, as their chests are not of iron, and they are, besides, anxious to appear wealthier than they really are.