Enthusiasm is of the greatest value, so long as we are not carried away by it.

And just in the same sense Goethe refuses to regard all self-denial as virtuous, but only the self-denial that leads to some useful end.

If anyone meets us who owes us a debt of gratitude, it immediately crosses our mind. How often can we meet some one to whom we owe gratitude, without thinking of it!

Duty: where a man loves what he commands himself to do.

I pity those who make much ado about the transitory nature of all things and are lost in the contemplation of earthly vanity: are we not here to make the transitory permanent? This we can do only if we know how to value both.

The true is Godlike: we do not see it itself; we must guess at it through its manifestations.

It should be our earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and reason.

Wisdom lies only in truth.

An author can show no greater respect for his public than by never bringing it what it expects, but what he himself thinks right and proper in that stage of his own and others' culture in which for the time he finds himself.