Franz Grillparzer
What a pathetic creature is man! His senses are awakened by the hope for the very thing whose consummation puts him to sleep.Collection: Success
Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.Collection: Truth
The most irascible person is most likely to become apathetic in dangerous situations.Collection: Dangerous Situations
Let no one say that taking action is hard. Action is aided by courage, by the moment, by impulse, and the hardest thing in the world is making a decision.Collection: Courage
I notice well that one stray step from the habitual path leads irresistibly into a new direction. Life moves forward, it never reverses its course.Collection: Life
I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself.Collection: Deception
Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.Collection: Mind
Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.Collection: Hate
Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?Collection: Sarcastic
Pity, but never love bestows kind words upon the slave.Collection: Love
Our age believed herself pregnant with auspicious progeny, but when her hour came, it turned out to be dropsy.Collection: Age
Transcendence: that which transcends experience.Collection: Experience
How can you say that love is blind? Keener than a young eagle's is its sight.Collection: Love
Praised be the good willing women who understand and take part in the fun – the body is an exacting beater, and even the heart is made of flesh.Collection: Fun
Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch’s biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!Collection: Reading