Maxims and Reflections
from green branches. When roses bloom, you see them blooming everywhere.
413
Lucidity is a due distribution of light and shade.' _Hamann_.
414
A man who has no acquaintance with foreign languages knows nothing of
his own.
415
We must remember that there are many men who, without being productive,
are anxious to say something important, and the results are most
curious.
416
Deep and earnest thinkers are in a difficult position with regard to the
public.
417
Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to
let us know that the author has known something.
418
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.
419
The so-called Nature-poets are men of active talent, with a fresh
stimulus and reaction from an over-cultured, stagnant, mannered epoch of
art. They cannot avoid commonplace.
420
Productions are now possible which, without being bad, have no value.
They have no value, because they contain nothing; and they are not bad,
because a general form of good-workmanship is present to the author's
mind.
421
All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in
some particulars a little unintelligible.
422
A romance is a subjective epic in which the author begs leave to treat
the world after his own ideas. The only question is, whether he has any
ideas; the rest will follow of itself.
423
Subjective or so-called sentimental poetry has now been admitted to an
equality with objective and descriptive. This was inevitable; because
otherwise the whole of modern poetry would have to be discarded. It is
now obvious that when men of truly poetical genius appear, they will
describe more of the particular feelings of the inner life than of the
general facts of the great life of the world. This has already taken
place to such a degree that we have a poetry without figures of speech,
which can by no means be refused all praise.
424
Superstition is the poetry of life, and so it does not hurt the poet to
be superstitious.
425
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.
426
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.
427
A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy.
428
Against the three unities there is nothing to be said, if the subject is
very simple; but there are times when thrice three unities, skilfully
interwoven, produce a very pleasant effect.
429
The sentimentality of the English is humorous and tender; of the French,
popular and pathetic; of the Germans, naïve and realistic.
430
Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings.
431
If a man sets out to reproach an author with obscurity, he should first
of all examine his own mind, to see if he is himself all clearness
within. Twilight makes even plain writing illegible.
432
It is with books as with new acquaintances. At first we are highly
delighted, if we find a general agreement,--if we are pleasantly moved
on any of the chief sides of our existence. With a closer acquaintance
differences come to light; and then reasonable conduct mainly consists
in not shrinking back at once, as may happen in youth, but in keeping
firm hold of the things in which we agree, and being quite clear about
the things in which we differ, without on that account desiring any
union.
433
In psychological reflection the greatest difficulty is this: that inner
and outer must always be viewed in parallel lines, or, rather,
interwoven. It is a continual systole and diastole, an inspiration and
an expiration of the living soul. If this cannot be put into words, it
should be carefully marked and noted.
434
My relations with Schiller rested on the decided tendency of both of us
towards a single aim, and our common activity rested on the diversity of
the means by which we endeavoured to attain that aim.
435
Once when a slight difference was mentioned between us, of which I was
reminded by a passage in a letter of his, I made the following
reflections: There is a great difference between a poet seeking the
particular for the universal, and seeing the universal in the
particular. The one gives rise to Allegory, where the particular serves
only as instance or example of the general; but the other is the true
nature of Poetry, namely, the expression of the particular without any
thought of, or reference to, the general. If a man grasps the particular
vividly, he also grasps the general, without being aware of it at the
time; or he may make the discovery long afterwards.
436
There may be eclectic philosophers, but not an eclectic philosophy.
437
But every one is an eclectic who, out of the things that surround and
take place about him, appropriates what is suited to his nature; and
this is what is meant by culture and progress, in matters of theory or
practice.
438
Various maxims of the ancients, which we are wont to repeat again and
again, had a meaning quite different from that which is apt to attach to
them in later times.
439
The saying that no one who is unacquainted with or a stranger to
geometry should enter the philosopher's school, does not mean that a man
must become a mathematician to attain the wisdom of the world.
440
Geometry is here taken in its primary elements, such as are contained in
Euclid and laid before every beginner; and then it is the most perfect
propædeutic and introduction to philosophy.
441
When a boy begins to understand that an invisible point must always come
before a visible one, and that the shortest way between two points is a
straight line, before he can draw it on his paper with a pencil, he
experiences a certain pride and pleasure. And he is not wrong; for he
has the source of all thought opened to him; idea and reality, _potentia
et actu_, are become clear; the philosopher has no new discovery to
bring him; as a mathematician, he has found the basis of all thought for
himself.
442
And if we turn to that significant utterance, _Know thyself_, we must
not explain it in an ascetic sense. It is in nowise the self-knowledge
of our modern hypochondrists, humorists, and self-tormentors. It simply
means: pay some attention to yourself; take note of yourself; so that
you may know how you come to stand towards those like you and towards
the world. This involves no psychological torture; every capable man
knows and feels what it means. It is a piece of good advice which every
one will find of the greatest advantage in practice.
443
Let us remember how great the ancients were; and especially how the
Socratic school holds up to us the source and standard of all life and
action, and bids us not indulge in empty speculation, but live and do.
444
So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and
furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate
ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will
never disappear.
445
If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to
form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that
we really became men.
446
The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and
grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life.
447
In the presence of antiquity, the mind that is susceptible to poetry and
art feels itself placed in the most pleasing ideal state of nature; and
even to this day the Homeric hymns have the power of freeing us, at any
rate, for moments, from the frightful burden which the tradition of
several thousand years has rolled upon us.
448
There is no such thing as patriotic art and patriotic science. Both art
and science belong, like all things great and good, to the whole world,
and can be furthered only by a free and general interchange of ideas
among contemporaries, with continual reference to the heritage of the
past as it is known to us.
449
Poetical talent is given to peasant as well as to knight; all that is
required is that each shall grasp his position and treat it worthily.
450
An historic sense means a sense so cultured that, in valuing the deserts
and merits of its own time, it takes account also of the past.
451
The best that history gives us is the enthusiasm it arouses.
452
The historian's duty is twofold: first towards himself, then towards his
readers. As regards himself, he must carefully examine into the things
that could have happened; and, for the reader's sake, he must determine
what actually did happen. His action towards himself is a matter between
himself and his colleagues; but the public must not see into the secret
that there is little in history which can be said to be positively
determined.
453
The historian's duty is to separate the true from the false, the certain
from the uncertain, and the doubtful from that which cannot be accepted.
454
It is seldom that any one of great age becomes historical to himself,
and finds his contemporaries become historical to him, so that he
neither cares nor is able to argue with any one.
455
On a closer examination of the matter, it will be found that the
historian does not easily grasp history as something historical. In
whatever age he may live, the historian always writes as though he
himself had been present at the time of which he treats, instead of
simply narrating the facts and movements of that time. Even the mere
chronicler only points more or less to his own limitations, or the
peculiarities of his town or monastery or age.
456
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.
457
That is the reason why the Bible will never lose its power; because, as
long as the world lasts, no one can stand up and say: I grasp it as a
whole and understand all the parts of it. But we say humbly: as a whole
it is worthy of respect, and in all its parts it is applicable.
458
There is and will be much discussion as to the use and harm of
circulating the Bible. One thing is clear to me: mischief will result,
as heretofore, by using it phantastically as a system of dogma; benefit,
as heretofore, by a loving acceptance of its teachings.
459
I am convinced that the Bible will always be more beautiful the more it
is understood; the more, that is, we see and observe that every word
which we take in a general sense and apply specially to ourselves, had,
under certain circumstances of time and place, a peculiar, special, and
directly individual reference.
460
The incurable evil of religious controversy is that while one party
wants to connect the highest interest of humanity with fables and
phrases, the other tries to rest it on things that satisfy no one.
461
If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them
all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted
with this kind of literature.
462
The classical is health; and the romantic, disease.
463
Ovid remained classical even in exile: it is not in himself that he sees
misfortune, but in his banishment from the metropolis of the world.
464
The romantic is already fallen into its own abysm. It is hard to imagine
anything more degraded than the worst of the new productions.
465
Bodies which rot while they are still alive, and are edified by the