Top 218 Quotes & Sayings by Franz Grillparzer

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Franz Grillparzer

Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer was an Austrian writer who was considered to be the leading Austrian dramatist of the 19th century. His plays were and are frequently performed at the famous Burgtheater in Vienna. He also wrote the oration for Ludwig van Beethoven's funeral.

Those who want to row on the ocean of human knowledge do not get far, and the storm drives those out of their course who set sail.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.
I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow. — © Franz Grillparzer
I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.
Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.
There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.
You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.
This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.
No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.
To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism.
The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is. — © Franz Grillparzer
It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.
If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.
No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.
Prose talks and poetry sings.
Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses.
Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.
Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.
The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We're progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.
Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.
If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept.
Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.
Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.
Since love is folly, a foolish woman is more dangerous than a wise one.
Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?
People of talent resemble a musical instrument more closely than they do a musician. Without outside help, they produce not a single sound, but given even the slightest touch, and a magnificent tune emanates from them.
I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else.
Our age believed herself pregnant with auspicious progeny, but when her hour came, it turned out to be dropsy.
Feeling and thinking are actually the blind man who carries the lame.
Disregard for the consequences and for right and wrong nowadays passes as energy.
Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.
The military and the clergy cause us much annoyance; the clergy and the military, they empty our wallets and rob our intelligence.
Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.
Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground. — © Franz Grillparzer
Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground.
As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.
Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.
How great seems human progress when we consider where it began, and how insignificant, when we contemplate the goals for which itstrives.
Pity, but never love bestows kind words upon the slave.
A person who looks different all the time frightens me. Only one animal changes its skin: the snake.
The course of modern learning leads from humanism via nationalism to bestiality.
The graceful flowers of innocence are more valuable than the laurel crown of fame.
What are the characteristics of today's world so that one may recognize it by them?" It pays pensions and borrows money: credit and monuments.
Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.
I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself. — © Franz Grillparzer
I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself.
A love that dies has never lived.
Why do villains have so much influence? Because the honest people are terribly dense.
Soon there will be nothing truly profound that is not achieved by everyone, and of the difficult things in this world only one will be left: simplicity.
Is it true that one travels in order to know mankind? It is easier to get to know other people at home, but abroad one gets to know oneself.
History is the zoology of the human race.
Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.
Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.
Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
Es binden Sklavenfesseln nur die H a« nde, Der Sinn, er macht den Freien und den Knecht. The chains of slavery can only bind the hands. The mind makes us either free or enslaved.
Freedom requires guns.
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