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 repetition; 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.