Franz Grillparzer
Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.Collection: Wisdom
Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.Collection: Thanksgiving
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.Collection: Poetry
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.Collection: Science
Those who want to row on the ocean of human knowledge do not get far, and the storm drives those out of their course who set sail.Collection: Knowledge
Prose talks and poetry sings.Collection: Poetry
You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.
Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses.
Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism.
No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.
No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.
Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.
The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.
This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.
It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.
Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.
Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We're progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.
Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.
To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.
There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.
The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.
If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept.
Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.Collection: Skills
Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.Collection: Beautiful
The course of modern learning leads from humanism via nationalism to bestiality.Collection: Modern
Freedom requires guns.Collection: Gun
As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.Collection: Past
I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else.Collection: Pride
How great seems human progress when we consider where it began, and how insignificant, when we contemplate the goals for which itstrives.Collection: Goal
Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.Collection: Climbing
Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground.Collection: Trying
Disregard for the consequences and for right and wrong nowadays passes as energy.Collection: Energy
Why do villains have so much influence? Because the honest people are terribly dense.Collection: Honesty
A love that dies has never lived.Collection: Love
Soon there will be nothing truly profound that is not achieved by everyone, and of the difficult things in this world only one will be left: simplicity.Collection: Profound
He who takes people for smart pays an expensive lesson.Collection: Smart
Es binden Sklavenfesseln nur die H a« nde, Der Sinn, er macht den Freien und den Knecht. The chains of slavery can only bind the hands. The mind makes us either free or enslaved.Collection: Hands
The graceful flowers of innocence are more valuable than the laurel crown of fame.Collection: Flower
Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.Collection: Money
People of talent resemble a musical instrument more closely than they do a musician. Without outside help, they produce not a single sound, but given even the slightest touch, and a magnificent tune emanates from them.Collection: Inspirational
Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.Collection: Education
What are the characteristics of today's world so that one may recognize it by them?" It pays pensions and borrows money: credit and monuments.Collection: Money
A person who looks different all the time frightens me. Only one animal changes its skin: the snake.Collection: Animal
History is the zoology of the human race.Collection: Race