“Live with your century; but do not be its creature.”

Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.

It is only through the morning gate of the beautiful that you can penetrate into the realm of knowledge. That which we feel here as beauty we shall one day know as truth.

Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air.

There is more to life than just existing and having a pleasant time.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

Thus Arm in Arm with thee I dare defy my century into the lists.

Be true, and thou shalt fetter time with everlasting chain.

A virtuous name is the precious only good, for which queens and peasants’ wives must contest together.

The worst of me is known, and I can say that I am better than the reputation I bear.

Heaven and earth fight in vain against a dunce!

Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine.

Never the grave gives back what it has won!

Sorrows must die with the joys they outnumber.

O God, how lovely still is life!

To the fool-king belongs the world.

If you want to study yourself, look into the hearts of other people. If you want to study other people, look into your own heart.

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.

I do not know when, but I know that many have come in this century to develop arts and sciences, sow the seeds of a new culture that will flourish, unexpected, sudden, just when the power is deluded into believing they have won.

For those [observations] that I made in Leipzig in my youth and up to my 21st year, I usually call childish and of doubtful value. Those that I took later until my 28th year [i.e., until 1574] I call juvenile and fairly serviceable.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

We are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.