Quotes by Franz Grillparzer

• Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.
• The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
• The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
• 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.
• 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.
• To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
• To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism.
• 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.
• You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.
• 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.
• Prose talks and poetry sings.
• When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
• I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.
• Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.
• Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.
• If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.
• 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.
• 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.
• Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses.
• Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
• 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.
• No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.
• No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.
• 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.