The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Ii Part 36

The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.

In the smithy the iron is softened by blowing up the fire, and taking the dross from the bar. As soon as it is purified, it is beaten and pressed, and becomes firm again by the addition of fresh water. The same thing happens to a man at the hands of his teacher.

What belongs to a man he cannot get rid of, even though he throws it away.

Of true religions there are only two: one of them recognizes and wors.h.i.+ps the Holy that, without form or shape, dwells in and around us; and the other recognizes and wors.h.i.+ps it in its fairest form. Everything that lies between these two is idolatry.

The Saints were all at once driven from heaven; and senses, thought and heart were turned from a divine mother with a tender child, to the grown man doing good and suffering evil, who was later transfigured into a being half-divine in its nature, and then recognized and honored as G.o.d himself. He stood against a background where the Creator had opened out the universe; a spiritual influence went out from him; his sufferings were adopted as an example, and his transfiguration was the pledge of ever-lastingness.

As a coal is revived by incense, so prayer revives the hopes of the heart.

From a strict point of view we must have a reformation of ourselves every day, and protest against others, even though it be in no religious sense.

It should be our earnest endeavor to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine and reason.

It is an endeavor which we cannot evade, and which is daily to be renewed.

Let every man examine himself, and he will find this a much harder task than he might suppose; for, unhappily, a man usually takes words as mere make-s.h.i.+fts; his knowledge and his thought are in most cases better than his method of expression.

False, irrelevant, and futile ideas may arise in ourselves and others, or find their way into us from without. Let us persist in the effort to remove them as far as we can, by plain and honest purpose.

Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.

A man is not deceived by others; he deceives himself.

Laws are all made by old people and by men. Youths and women want the exceptions, old people the rules.

Chinese, Indian and Egyptian antiquities are never more than curiosities; it is well to make acquaintance with them; but in point of moral and aesthetic culture they can help us little.

The German runs no greater danger than to advance with and by the example of his neighbors. There is perhaps no nation that is fitter for the process of self-development; so that it has proved of the greatest advantage to Germany to have obtained the notice of the world so late.

The greatest difficulties lie where we do not look for them.

The mind endowed with active powers and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth.

Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.

When a great idea enters the world as a Gospel, it becomes an offense to the mult.i.tude, which stagnates in pedantry; and to those who have much learning, but little depth, it is folly.

You may recognize the utility of an idea, and yet not quite understand how to make a perfect use of it.

_Credo Deum_! That is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but to recognize G.o.d where and as he reveals himself, is the only true bliss on earth.

Kepler said: 'My wish is that I may perceive the G.o.d whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside me.' The good man was not aware that, in that very moment, the divine in him stood in the closest connection with the divine in the Universe.

What is predestination? It is this: G.o.d is mightier and wiser than we are, and so he does with us as he pleases.

Toleration should, strictly speaking, be only a pa.s.sing mood; it ought to lead to acknowledgment and appreciation. To tolerate a person is to affront him.

Faith, Love and Hope once felt, in a quiet sociable hour, a plastic impulse in their nature; they worked together and created a lovely image, a Pandora in the higher sense, Patience.

'I stumbled over the roots of the tree which I planted.' It must have been an old forester who said that.

Does the sparrow know how the stork feels?

Lamps make oil spots, and candles want snuffing; it is only the light of heaven that s.h.i.+nes pure and leaves no stain.

If you miss the first b.u.t.ton-hole, you will not succeed in b.u.t.toning up your coat.

A burnt child dreads the fire; an old man who has often been singed is afraid of warming himself.

It is not worth while to do anything for the world that we have with us, as the existing order may in a moment pa.s.s away. It is for the past and the future that we must work: for the past, to acknowledge its merits; for the future, to try to increase its value.

Let no one think that people have waited for him as for the Savior.

Character in matters great and small consists in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable.

Can a nation become ripe? That is a strange question. I would answer, Yes! if all the men could be born thirty years of age. But as youth will always be too forward and old age too backward, the really mature man is always hemmed in between them, and has to resort to strange devices to make his way through.

The most important matters of feeling as of reason, of experience as of reflection, should be treated of only by word of mouth. The spoken word at once dies if it is not kept alive by some other word following on it and suited to the hearer. Observe what happens in social converse. If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation. With the written word the case is still worse. No one cares to read anything to which he is not already to some extent accustomed; he demands the known and the familiar under an altered form. Still, the written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.

Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours.

It is with history as with nature and with everything of any depth, it may be past, present or future: the further we seriously pursue it, the more difficult are the problems that appear.

Every phenomenon is within our reach if we treat it as an inclined plane, which is of easy ascent, though the thick end of the wedge may be steep and inaccessible.

If a man would enter upon some course of knowledge, he must either be deceived or deceive himself, unless external necessity irresistibly determines him. Who would become a physician if, at one and the same time, he saw before him all the horrible sights that await him?

Literature is a fragment of fragments: the least of what happened and was spoken, has been written; and of the things that have been written, very few have been preserved.

And yet, with all the fragmentary nature of literature, we find thousandfold repet.i.tion; which shows how limited is man's mind and destiny.

We must remember that there are many men who, without being productive, are anxious to say something important, and the results are most curious.

Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

An author can show no greater respect for his public than by never bringing it what it expects, but what he himself thinks right and proper in that stage of his own and others' culture in which for the time he finds himself.

That glorious hymn, _Veni Creator Spiritus_, is really an appeal to genius. That is why it speaks so powerfully to men of intellect and power.

Translators are like busy match-makers; they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.

My relations with Schiller rested on the decided tendency of both of us toward a single aim, and our common activity rested on the diversity of the means by which we endeavored to attain that aim.

The best that history gives us is the enthusiasm it arouses.

We really learn only from those books which we cannot criticise. The author of a book which we could criticise would have to learn from us.