Englisch

I awoke one morning and found myself famous.

Truth is always strange — stranger than fiction.

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies.

Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me —

"Hope" is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul — And sings the tune without the words — And never stops — at all —

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you — Nobody — too?

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

The years teach much which the days never know.

We have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best.

A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, 'All right, then, I'll go to hell.'

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead…

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.

I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players.

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

God finds himself by creating.

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.

Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

That government is best which governs least.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won

Resist much, obey little.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

I can resist everything except temptation.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

A friend is another self.

All humans by nature desire to know.

Man is by nature a political animal.

One swallow does not make a summer.

Love, and do what you will.

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.

Take up and read.

The bureaucrat is all-powerful in France: moreover, he is virtually irreplaceable.

Now it's between you and me!

The secret of great fortunes with no apparent cause is a forgotten crime — because it was properly committed.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.

Each is the maker of his own fortune.

He preaches well who lives well.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune.

He who falls today may rise tomorrow.

Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men.

In a place of La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall, there lived not long ago a hidalgo of the kind that keep a lance in the rack, an old shield, a lean nag, and a greyhound for coursing.

„What giants?", said Sancho Panza. „Those there", replied his master, „with the long arms."

Know, Sancho, that one man is no more than another unless he does more than another.

There is no book so bad that it has nothing good in it.

The pen is the tongue of the soul.

When one door closes, another opens.

Said the frying pan to the cauldron: Get out of my way, you sooty one.

It seemed to me that I was as a harvest of greater philosophy than I had been before: as if I had been awakened from a dream.

If God made woman with excellence, she is of the very highest excellence.

To whose benefit?

History is the witness of times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

O the times! O the customs!

The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.

We may not hope to build a better world before individuals become better themselves.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

A scientist in a laboratory is not only a technician; he stands before natural phenomena like a child before a world of wonder.

Have the courage to think with your own head.

Love, which absolves no loved one from loving,

the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

You were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.

A go-between was the book and he who wrote it.

Let us not speak of them, but look and pass on.

Abandon all hope, you who enter.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost.

You shall learn how salt is the taste of another's bread, and how hard a path it is to go down and up by another's stairs.

And thence we came forth to see again the stars.

If someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and that the truth really was outside Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

If God does not exist, everything is permitted.

Beauty will save the world.

If only I were at least a man, / Then heaven would surely counsel me;

Where one feels most, one knows little to say.

Ah, one bears all things lightly when one is but young, / Only young still and well!

Oh, eerie it is to walk across the moor

Such a great treasure, for once to be rather than to seem!

But in the infinite multitude of so many other devotions, most of which have been obscure or ignored, how many have remained more or less sterile, because they were isolated and were not supported by collective and organized sympathies!

I wish to be carried to my grave like a dog, without a single one of your ceremonies.

On extraordinary occasions, such as those bringing together at Cologne or Châlons princes of the military art belonging to different nationalities, would it not be desirable that they take advantage of such a kind of congress to formulate some international, conventional and sacred principle which, once agreed upon and ratified, would serve as the basis for relief societies for the wounded in the various countries of Europe?

Would it not be possible, in time of peace and tranquillity, to form relief societies whose purpose would be to have care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and well-qualified volunteers?

The simplest truths are those that come to man last.

Wanting to be witty is often a greater punishment than being witless.

Those who know nothing must believe everything.

With talent it is as with luck: one must have it.

Nothing can be so near to a human being as God. God is closer to me than I am to myself.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

Whoever seeks God for the sake of something else, or with something else, does not seek God.

From my homeland, behind the red lightning, the clouds come drifting here; but father and mother are long dead, no one there knows me anymore.

The stars shone so golden; alone at the window I stood and heard from far away a post-horn in the quiet land.

Who built you, lovely wood, so high up there above? The Master I will gladly praise as long as my voice still rings.

In a cool valley a mill-wheel turns; my dearest love has vanished who once dwelt there.

Mild air comes flowing blue — spring, it surely must be spring! Horn-calls ring off toward the woods, the bright gleam of bold eyes;

It was as if heaven had silently kissed the earth, so that she in blossom-shimmer had to dream only of him.

A song sleeps in all things that dream on and on, and the world begins to sing, if only you find the magic word.

And my soul spread its wings out wide, and flew through the silent lands as though it were flying home.

O valleys wide, o heights, o fair and verdant wood, you devout retreat of all my joy and woe!

Come, comfort of the world, you silent night! How gently you descend the mountains, the breezes all are sleeping; one boatman only, weary of the road, sings out across the sea his evening song in praise of God, within the harbor.

It is already late, already cold; why ride alone through the wood? The wood is long, you are alone, you lovely bride! I'll lead you home!

To whom God wants to show his favor, him he sends into the wide world.

Labour is the first basic condition for all human existence, and that to such an extent that we have to say that, in a certain sense, labour created man himself.

Freedom is the insight into necessity.

The state is not „abolished", it withers away.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.

We have two ears and one mouth, so that we may hear more and speak less.

Some things are in our control and others not.

Humanity's self-love has, in the course of time, suffered three severe blows.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious in mental life.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

Let man be noble, helpful and good!

What from your fathers' heritage is lent, earn it anew, to really possess it!

My worthy friend, gray are all theories, and green alone Life's golden tree.

Here I am Man,—dare man to be!

While Man's desires and aspirations stir, he cannot choose but err.

He who possesses science and art has religion too.

Joy and fear are magnifying glasses.

Before eating, the thoughts of the stomach disturb the thoughts of the soul, yet one does not gladly acknowledge this inner state, but cloaks it with slow words on indifferent subjects.

How often do the mightiest forces fade because no wind kindles them!

In the home must begin what is to shine in the fatherland.

What I earn by day with the lyre is all spent again at night!

True human happiness is a tender flower; thousands of pests buzz around it; a tainted breath kills it.

When I think of Germany in the night, I am robbed of all sleep.

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.

Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder.

God will forgive me; that is his profession.

I cannot divine what it meaneth, This haunting nameless pain: A tale of the bygone ages Keeps brooding through my brain:

That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.

Character is to a man his daimon.

We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.

War is the father of all and the king of all.

Nature loves to hide.

Man is the first creature of creation set free.

Without language man has no reason, and without reason no language.

Every people has its center of gravity within itself, as every sphere has its center.

First of all, Chaos came into being.

Before virtue the immortal gods have placed sweat.

Fools — they do not know how much more is the half than the whole.

For the human being is the lesser world.

O noblest greenness, who is rooted in the sun.

Full of merit, yet poetically man dwells upon this earth.

But where danger is, there grows the saving power also.

He who has thought the deepest loves the most living.

But what remains, the poets establish.

Seize the day, trust as little as possible to tomorrow.

I have built a monument more lasting than bronze.

We are but dust and shadow.

He who has begun is half done: dare to know, begin!

Dare to use your own understanding!

Act in such a way that the maxim of your will can always at the same time count as a principle of universal legislation.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Drink, O eyes, what your lashes hold / Of the world's golden abundance!

Eyes, my dear little windows, / You have given me lovely light so long, / Letting image after image kindly in: / One day you shall be darkened!

Man should not be virtuous but natural, and virtue will come of itself.

Respect every man's fatherland, but love your own!

A poet is an unhappy person carrying deep anguish in himself, whose lips are formed such that sighs emerge as beautiful music.

Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, and you will also regret it.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Faith means accepting precisely the paradox that existence is.

When three persons walk together, one of them must be my teacher.

What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?

To acknowledge what you do not know — that is knowledge.

One does not even live once.

It is not enough to have no thoughts; one must also be unable to express them.

Language is the mother, not the maid, of thought.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.

Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise.

You are an old, pious hermit who sits still and dreams.

At last the priest stood in the pulpit.

A stern and capable woman she is, the major's wife at Ekeby.

Only if the poet stays true to himself can emotion blossom into poetry.

Neither Italians nor Germans! Romansh we want to remain!

The old forest, that little by little decays, much resembles too our long-tried tongue, which from a once vast territory is now driven into such narrow bounds. If the Romansh do not all do their duty, it will end with it, as with Tamangur.

Who knows others is wise. Who knows himself is enlightened.

Even the longest march begins with the first step.

From clay spokes the wheel takes shape — yet at the center, in the emptiness, lies its use.

The soft overcomes the hard, the weak triumphs over the strong.

I have at home a blue piano, but know no note at all.

Your soul, which loves mine, is woven with it into the Tibet of carpets.

I want into the boundless back to myself.

Let each strive for his unbribed, prejudice-free love!

No human being must must.

A single thought of gratitude lifted to heaven is the most perfect prayer.

I cannot say whether things will get better if they change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, no apostle can look out.

Very many people, perhaps most, must first know that a thing is there before they can find it.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

Too much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

The common mind always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion.

A sure sign of a good book is that one likes it more and more as one grows older.

Where moderation is a fault, indifference is a crime.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

One must do something new in order to see something new.

Whoever understands nothing but chemistry does not properly understand that either.

Nothing stands more in the way of the progress of science than believing one knows what one does not yet know.

Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently.

Order reigns in Berlin! You dull henchmen! Your „order" is built on sand. The revolution will tomorrow „rear itself up rattling" again.

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads: either transition to socialism, or regression into barbarism.

All things are interwoven with one another; a sacred bond unites them.

Soon you will have forgotten everything; soon all will have forgotten you.

The best revenge is not to become like your enemy.

Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged.

Thou must be like a promontory of the sea, against which though the waves beat continually, yet it both itself stands, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and quieted.

Not as though thou hadst thousands of years to live. Death hangs over thee: whilst yet thou livest, whilst thou mayest, be good.

Nothing happens to anyone that he is not by nature fitted to bear.

Use thyself even unto those things that thou doest at first despair of.

It was a custom among the ancients, to which Priscian bears witness, in the books they once wrote, to speak rather obscurely.

Whoever has received from God knowledge and the gift of good eloquence ought not to keep silent or conceal it, but rather show it willingly.

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Religion is the opium of the people.

I am not a carefully reasoned book, / I am a human being with his contradictions.

The jet ascends and falling pours / Brimful into the marble bowl, / Which, veiling itself, overflows / Into a second basin's ground; / The second, growing too rich, gives / Its flowing flood to the third, / And each one takes and gives at once / And streams and rests.

Only the sun is eternally young, it alone is eternally beautiful.

I have here gathered a posy of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

I do not portray being; I portray passing.

What do I know?

The mother laments — do you hear? Anger her no more!

Stand up, resist, Romansh, for the Grisons tongue, do not let your gift be buried on purpose!

Stand up, defend, Romansh, your old tongue, demand respect for your mind!

Stand up, Engadiner, stand up, you Sutsilvan and Sursilvan, hold ever dear your Romance tongue!

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. So do the spirits who are prevented from changing their opinions.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Whoever fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Hath one his wherefore? of life, then he is on good terms with almost every how?

What does not kill me makes me stronger.

He who knows that he is deep, strives for clearness; he who would seem deep to the multitude, strives for obscurity.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that whoever wants to act the angel acts the beast.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

We never live, but we hope to live.

Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

All the unhappiness of men arises from one single thing: that they cannot stay quietly in a room.

The self is hateful.

Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed.

Man infinitely surpasses man.

Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature — but he is a thinking reed.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

True eloquence mocks eloquence, true morality mocks morality.

Sense-perception is the foundation of all knowledge.

God is near where humans show love to one another.

The good remains forever good, but the bad grows worse with age.

Life educates.

The essence of humanity unfolds only in tranquility.

The center of all human corruption is hardness of heart.

Truth is a medicine that attacks.

We are the bees of the invisible.

You must change your life.

Once each, only once. Once and no more. And we too once. Never again. But this once to have been, even if only once: to have been earthly seems not revocable.

Who speaks of victories? Enduring is everything.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and nothing reaches them so little as criticism.

Perhaps the miracle, too, has a reason of its own.

Where should I go now, I, a Trotta?

It was a good time, I say so without weeping for the better one.

I feel my heart, and I know mankind.

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits across from you and hears you sweetly speaking close by

Some say a host of horsemen, some say infantry, and some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest thing on the dark earth — but I say it is whatever one loves.

So let him test, who binds for life, if heart to heart can be found right.

Earnest is life, serene is art.

The most pious cannot stay at peace if his evil neighbor does not so will it.

Early they practice who would become a master.

The dignity of man is given into your hand — preserve it! It sinks with you. With you it shall rise.

Everyone takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Life swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom.

Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants.

The world is my representation.

Not for life, but for school we learn.

Leisure without study is death — the tomb of a living man.

Everything, Lucilius, is another's; time alone is ours.

To live, Lucilius, is to be a soldier.

Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Pay it and do not neglect it.

I know one thing: no one does wrong willingly.

The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

I know that I know nothing.

An exceptional grace of fate has allowed us to sit in the auditorium during the dreadful tragedy now unfolding in Europe — let us take off our hats.

All those who live beyond our borders are our neighbors, and for now dear neighbors; all those who live within are more than neighbors — they are our brothers.

We want to remain Swiss.

Where the footpath begins, heathland soon spreads with short grass and strong mountain herbs sending their scent to the wanderer.

...as the sun bids the mountains good night, it casts upon them its most beautiful rays...

...it began to rustle louder in the old firs, a mighty wind swept down and roared and raged through the dense crowns...

In the old firs all was now quite still, and on every branch lay the white snow, and in the sunshine it gleamed and sparkled everywhere.

Empathy is the experience of foreign experience itself.

Ave Crux, spes unica! Come, let us go for our people.

Whoever seeks the truth seeks God, whether he is aware of it or not.

Beauty is nothing but the promise of happiness.

A novel is a mirror carried along a road.

You grey town by the sea, you grey town by the sea — you shall be praised.

The fog is rising, the leaves are falling; pour the wine, the lovely!

No reasonable person would think of washing away ink stains with ink, or oil stains with oil. Only blood is to be washed away again and again with blood.

It is astonishing how much one feels such a book as a friend — how one can tell it everything and lament to it, how one can shed over its pages the tears one must hide from others, especially from a beloved invalid.

Stage fright is a side-effect of vanity, a trembling question to fate: how will I please?, with the whole emphasis on the syllable «I».

I realized too soon that battle-fervor is nothing superhuman but — sub-human; not a mystical revelation from Lucifer's realm, but a reminiscence from the realm of beasts — a re-awakening of bestiality.

The greatest truths are the simplest.

To love means to live the life of the one you love.

Knowledge is a tool, not an end.

Where there is love, there is God also.

If in the first act a rifle hangs on the wall, then in the last act it must go off.

Brevity is the sister of talent.

Everything in a human being should be beautiful: the face, the clothing, the soul, the thoughts.

We shall rest!

Human stupidity is international.

For nothing is harder, and nothing demands more character, than to stand in open opposition to one's time and to say loudly: No.

School reform without social reform is an absurdity.

Soldiers are murderers.

The people get most things wrong; but they feel most things right.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

The best is the enemy of the good.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.