Maxims and Reflections

What is Classical is healthy; what is Romantic is sick.

The person engaged in action is always unconscionable; no one except the contemplative has a conscience.

Everything is simpler than one can imagine, at the same time more involved than can be comprehended.

Modern poets put a lot of water into their ink.

Scientific knowledge helps us mainly because it makes the wonder to which we are called by nature rather more intelligible.

You've only got to grow old to be more lenient; I see no fault committed of which I too haven't been guilty.

Nothing should be treasured more highly than the value of the day.

Among all peoples, the Greeks have dreamt life's dream most beautifully.

If some people hadn't felt obliged to repeat what is untrue simply because they had at one point maintained it, they would have turned into quite different people.

You ask which form of government is the best? Whichever teaches us to govern ourselves.

Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason; truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.

It is as certain as it is marvelous that truth and error come from one source. Therefore one often may not injure error, because at the same time one injures truth.

People say, “Artist, study nature!” But it is no small matter to develop what is noble out of what is common, beauty out of what lacks form.

Error is related to truth as sleeping is to waking. I have observed that when one has been in error, one turns to truth as though revitalized.

The world is a bell that is cracked: it clatters, but does not ring out clearly.

It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.

Nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action.

I'm sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations of earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is possible only if you can appreciate both.

Art is in itself noble; that is why the artist has no fear of what is common. This, indeed, is already ennobled when he takes it up.

People have to become really bad before they care for nothing but mischief, and delight in it.

He who does not speak foreign languages knows nothing about his own.

Very often when we have found ourselves forever separated from what we had intended to achieve, we have already, on our way, found something else worth desiring.

Association with women is the basic element of good manners.

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.

Hypotheses are scaffoldings erected in front of a building and then dismantled when the building is finished. They are indispensable for the workman; but you mustn't mistake the scaffolding for the building.

A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.

A thinking man's greatest happiness is to have fathomed what can be fathomed and to revere in silence what cannot be fathomed.

You often say to yourself in the course of your life that you ought to avoid having too much business, 'polypragmosyne' [incessant activity], and, more especially, that the older you get, the more you ought to avoid entering on new business. But it's all very well saying this, and giving yourself andothers good advice. The very fact of growing older means taking up a new business; all our circumstances change, and we must either stop doing anything at all or else willing and consciously take on the new role we have to play on life's stage.

Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious.

Behaviour is a mirror in which everyone shows his image.

The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth.

This is why we may say that those who parade piety as a purpose and an aim mostly turn into hypocrites

You really only know when you know little. Doubt grows with knowledge.

There's nothing clever that hasn't been thought of before — you've just got to try to think it all over again.

Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

Just as, out of habit, one consults a run-down clock as though it were still going, so too one may look at the face of a beautiful woman as though she were still in love.

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

When you see some evil you proceed to immediate action, you make an immediate attack to cure the symptom.

Mysteries do not as yet amount to miracles.

Piety is not an end but a means to attain by the greatest peace of mind the highest degree of culture.

Theories usually result from the precipitate reasoning of an impatient mind which would like to be rid of phenomena and replaces them with images, concepts, indeed often with mere words.

The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.