Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805)
Usually known as Friedrich Schiller, was a German poet, historian, dramatist, and playwright.
What is the short meaning of the long speech?
Life is only error,
And death is knowledge.
Appearance should never attain reality,
And if nature conquers, then must art retire.
We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissable, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?
The dignity of mankind is in your hands, preserve it!
Der Krieg ernährt den Krieg.
The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.
O the idea was childish, but divinely beautiful.
Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.
Many a crown shines spotless now
That yet was deeply sullied in the winning.
No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.
You saw his weakness, and he will never forgive you.
The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.
Was man nicht aufgibt, hat man nie verloren.
I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, — through the world's history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.
Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.
O who knows what slumbers in the background of the times?
World history is the world's court.
In thy breast are the stars of thy fate.
What one refuses in a minute
No eternity will return.