14 quotes
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Table-Talk (1857)
This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.
Table-Talk (1857)
Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.
Table-Talk (1857)
Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be, — a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen.
Table-Talk (1857)
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
Table-Talk (1857)
Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.
Table-Talk (1857)
"Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned.
Table-Talk (1857)
The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable.
Table-Talk (1857)
We often excuse our own want of philanthropy by giving the name of fanaticism to the more ardent zeal of others.
Table-Talk (1857)
The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, — the taste and stain from the lees of the vat.
Table-Talk (1857)
The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
Table-Talk (1857)
When we reflect that all the aspects of Nature, all the emotions of the soul, and all the events of life, have been the subjects of poetry for hundreds and thousands of years, we can hardly wonder that there should be so many resemblances and coincidences of expression among poets, but rather that they are not more numerous and more striking.
Table-Talk (1857)
Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
Table-Talk (1857)
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and short-comings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self-assertion of youth.
Table-Talk (1857)