Elective Affinities

The architect hands over to the rich man with the keys to his palace all the ease and comfort to be found in it without being able to enjoy any of it himself. Must the artist not in this way gradually become alienated from his art, since his work, like a child that has been provided for and left home, can no longer have any effect upon its father? And how beneficial it must have been for art when it was intended to be concerned almost exclusively with what was public property, and belonged to everybody and therefore also to the artist!

There are occasions ... when all consolation is base and it is a duty to despair.

There is no outward mark of politeness that does not have a profound moral reason. The right education would be that which taught the outward mark and the moral reason together.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Men who give way easily to tears are good. I have nothing to do with those who hearts are dry and who eyes are dry!

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.

No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstands others.

Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.

One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows.