| The best thing that the French achieved by their Revolution was a portion of Germanism. |
| Germanism is genuine popularity, and therefore an ideal. |
| Where children are, there is the golden age. |
| Spirit is now active here and there: when will Spirit be active in the whole? When will mankind, in the mass, begin to consider? |
| Nature is pure Past, foregone freedom; and therefore, throughout, the soil of history. |
| The antithesis of body and spirit is one of the most remarkable and dangerous of all antitheses. It has played an important part in history. |
| Only by comparing ourselves, as men, with other rational beings, could we know what we truly are, what position we occupy. |
| The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history. And, in general, only that history is history which might also be fable. |
| The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible. |
| Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion. |
| The more sinful man feels himself, the more Christian he is. |
Christianity is opposed to science, to art, to enjoyment in the proper sense.
It goes forth from the common man. It inspires the great majority of the limited on earth.
It is the germ of all democracy, the highest fact in the domain of the popular. |
| Light is the symbol of genuine self-possession. Therefore, light, according to analogy, is the action of the self-contact of matter. Accordingly, day is the consciousness of the planet, and while the sun, like a god, in eternal self-action, inspires the centre, one planet after another closes one eye for a longer or shorter time, and with cool sleep refreshes itself for new life and contemplation. Accordingly, here, too, there is religion. For is the life of the planets aught else but sun worship? |
| The Holy Ghost is more than the Bible. This should be our teacher of religion, not the dead, earthly, equivocal letter. |
| All faith is miraculous, and worketh miracles. |
| Sin is, indeed, the real evil in the world. All calamity proceeds from that. He who understands sin, understands virtue and Christianity, himself and the world. |
| The greatest of miracles is a virtuous act. |
| If a man could suddenly believe, in sincerity, that he was moral, he would be so. |
| We need not fear to admit that man has a preponderating tendency to evil. So much the better is he by nature, for only the unlike attracts. |
| Everything distinguished (peculiar) deserves ostracism. Well for it if it ostracizes itself. Everything absolute must quit the world. |
| A time will come, and that soon, when all men will be convinced that there can be no king without a republic, and no republic without a king; that both are as inseparable as body and soul. The true king will be a republic, the true republic a king. |
| In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise. |
| Most people know not how interesting they are, what interesting things they really utter. A true representation of themselves, a record and estimate of their sayings, would make them astonished at themselves, would help them to discover in themselves an entirely new world. |
| Man is the Messiah of Nature. |
| The soul is the most powerful of all poisons. It is the most penetrating and diffusible stimulus. |
| Every sickness is a musical problem; the cure is the musical solution. |
| Inoculation with death, also, will not be wanting in some future universal therapia. |
| The idea of a perfect health is interesting only in a scientific point of view. Sickness is necessary to individualization. |
| If God could be man, he can also be stone, plant, animal, element, and perhaps, in this way, there is a continuous redemption in nature. |
| Life is a disease of the spirit, a passionate activity. Rest is the peculiar property of the spirit. From the spirit comes gravitation. |
| As nothing can be free, so, too, nothing can be forced, but spirit. |
| A space-filling individual is a body, a time-filling individual is a soul. |
| It should be inquired whether nature has not essentially changed with the progress of culture. |
| All activity ceases when knowledge comes. The state of knowing is eudemonism, blest repose of contemplation, heavenly quietism. |
| Miracles, as contradictions of nature, are unmathematical. But there are no miracles in this sense. What we so term is intelligible precisely by means of mathematics; for nothing is miraculous to mathematics. |
| In music, mathematics appears formally, as revelation, as creative idealism. All enjoyment is musical, consequently mathematical. The highest life is mathematics. |
| There may be mathematicians of the first magnitude who cannot cipher. One can be a great cipherer without a conception of mathematics. |
| Instinct is genius in Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-recognition). |
| The fate which oppresses us is the sluggishness of our spirit. By enlargement and cultivation of our activity, we change ourselves into fate. Everything appears to stream in upon us, because we do not stream out. We are negative, because we choose to be so; the more positive we become, the more negative will the world around us be, until, at last, there is no more negative, and we are all in all. God wills gods. |
| All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is substance. |
| Every act of introversion—every glance into our interior—is at the same time ascension, going up to heaven, a glance at the veritable outward. |
| Only so far as a man is happily married to himself, is he fit for married life and family life generally. |
| One must never confess that one loves oneself. The secret of this confession is the life principle of the only true and eternal love. |
| We conceive God as personal, just as we conceive ourselves personal. God is just as personal and as individual as we are; for what we call I is not our true I, but only its off glance.
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