When we desire to recall what happened to us in the earliest period of youth, it often happens that we confound what we have heard from others with that which we really possess from our own direct experience.

​​These symbolical ceremonies, restoring antiquity as if by magic, could not be explained to us without leading us back into past times, and informing us of the manners, customs, and feelings of those early ancestors who were so strangely made present to us by pipers and deputies seemingly risen from the dead, and by tangible gifts which might be possessed by ourselves. (84)

 

To him, as well as other well-wishers, I could render myself very agreeable by telling tales, which they most delighted to hear when I was the hero of my own story. It greatly rejoiced them to know that such wonderful things could befall one of their own playfellows; nor was it any harm that they did not understand how I could find time and space for such adventures, as they must have been pretty well aware of all my comings and goings, and how I was occupied the entire day. Not the less necessary was it for me to select the localities of these occurrences, if not in another world, at least in another spot; and yet all was told as having taken place only to-day or yesterday. They therefore had to form for themselves greater illusions than I could have palmed off upon them. If I had not gradually learned, in accordance with the instincts of my nature, to work up these visions and conceits into artistic forms, such vain-glorious beginnings could not have gone on without producing evil consequences for myself in the end.

 (121)

 

As they could make nothing of it, they let the matter drop for this time: we went on playing together as before, which among children is an approved mode of reconciliation. (149)

 

But as great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness, so was it also in this case. (161)

 

Mercury, especially, made so vivid an impression on me, that I could almost be sworn that I had seen him with my own eyes. (206)

 

But because there was not always adequate room for all, and a few sheep more or less was no great matter to the cattle-painter, the largest landscape proved in the end too narrow. (210)

 

No one is easily satisfied with the counterfeit of an object still present, but how we value every silhouette of one who is absent or departed. (228)

 

Man may turn which way he please, and undertake any thing whatsoever, he will always return to the path which nature has once prescribed for him. (238)

 

When an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear witness, led me hither and thither; when the medley of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me,—I liked to take refuge in those Oriental regions, to plunge into the first books of Moses, and to find myself there, amid the scattered shepherd-tribes, at the same time in the greatest solitude and the greatest society. (255)

 

With respect to myself, I also had it in my mind to produce something extraordinary; but in what it was to consist was not clear. (289)

I kept her in my eye, and it may readily be supposed that I had not devised and uttered my plan without reference to her. My passion for her gave to what I said such an air of truth and probability, that, for a moment, I deceived myself, imagined myself as lonely and helpless as my story supposed, and felt extremely happy in the prospect of possessing her.

(306)

 

I kept her in my eye, and it may readily be supposed that I had not devised and uttered my plan without reference to her. My passion for her gave to what I said such an air of truth and probability, that, for a moment, I deceived myself, imagined myself as lonely and helpless as my story supposed, and felt extremely happy in the prospect of possessing her.

(338)

 

All these images pressed vividly one after the other before my soul, sharpened and spurred my distress, so that I did not know what to do for sorrow. I cast myself at full length upon the floor, and moistened it with my tears. (360)

 

I now experienced no satisfaction except in ruminating on my misery, and in a thousand-fold imaginary multiplication of it. My whole inventive faculty, my poetry and rhetoric, had pitched on this diseased spot, and threatened, precisely by means of this vitality, to involve body and soul into an incurable disorder. In this melancholy condition nothing more seemed to me worth a desire, nothing worth a wish. An infinite yearning, indeed, seized me at times to know how it had gone with my poor friends and my beloved, what had been the result of a stricter scrutiny, how far they were implicated in those crimes, or had been found guiltless. (363)

 

However, youth should be allowed its own course: it does not stick to false maxims very long; life soon tears or charms it away again. (373)

 

I obstinately persisted in trying to imitate the most magnificent things that offered themselves to my sight. Thus, to be sure, I acquired the faculty of paying a great attention to objects; but I only seized them as a whole, so far as they produced an effect: and, little as Nature had meant me for a descriptive poet, just as little would she grant me the capacity of a draughtsman for details. This, however, being the only way left me of uttering my thoughts, I stuck to it with so much stubbornness, nay, even with melancholy, that I always continued my labors the more zealously the less I saw they produced. (377)

 

Thus plants and flowers of the commonest kind may form a charming diary for us, because nothing that calls back the remembrance of a happy moment can be insignificant; and even now it would be hard for me to destroy as worthless many things of the kind that have remained to me from different epochs, because they transport me immediately to those times which I like to remember, although not without melancholy. (378)

 

Indeed, at all times, the poetic imitation of what I had perceived in myself, in others, and in nature, afforded me the greatest pleasure. I did it with ever-increasing facility, because it came by instinct, and no criticism had led me astray; and, if I did not feel full confidence in my productions, I could certainly regard them as defective, but not such as to be utterly rejected. Although here and there they were censured, I still retained my silent conviction that I could not but gradually improve, and that some time I might be honorably named along with Hagedorn, Gellert, and other such men. But such a distinction alone seemed to me too empty and inadequate; I wished to devote myself professionally and with zeal to those aforesaid fundamental studies, and, whilst I meant to advance more rapidly in my own works by a more thorough insight into antiquity, to qualify myself for a university professorship, which seemed to me the most desirable thing for a young man who strove for culture, and intended to contribute to that of others. (402)

 

Images, then! But where should these images be got except from nature? The painter professedly imitated nature: why not the poet also? But nature, as she lies before us, cannot be imitated: she contains so much that is insignificant and worthless, that one must make a selection; but what determines the choice? one must select that which is important: but what is important? (436)

 

For him who felt any thing productive in himself it was a desperate condition. (439)

 

During this intercourse, I perceived through conversation, through examples, and through my own reflections, that the first step in delivering ourselves from the wishy-washy, long-winded, empty epoch, could be taken only by definiteness, precision, and brevity. In the style which had hitherto prevailed, one could not distinguish the commonplace from what was better; since all were brought down to a level with each other. (446)

 

Deep minds are compelled to live in the past as well as in the future. The ordinary movements of the world can be of no importance to them, if they do not, in the course of ages up to the present, revere prophecies which have been revealed, and in the immediate, as well as in the most remote futurity, predictions still veiled. Hence arises a connection that is wanting in history, which seems to give us only an accidental wavering backwards and forwards in a necessarily limited circle. (456)

 

I was, after the fashion of humanity, in love with my name, and, as young, uneducated people commonly do, wrote it down everywhere. (461)

 

The numerous quarto volumes of manuscript which I left behind with my father might serve for sufficient witnesses of this; and what a mass of essays, rough draughts, and half-executed designs, had, more from despondency than conviction, gone up in smoke! (466) #potential

 

Whenever I desired a true basis in feeling or reflection for my poems, I was forced to grasp into my own bosom; whenever I required for my poetic representation an immediate intuition of an object or an event, I could not step outside the circle which was fitted to teach me, and inspire me with an interest. In this view I wrote at first certain little poems, in the form of songs or in a freer measure: they are founded on reflection, treat of the past, and for the most part take an epigrammatic turn. (467)

 

And thus began that tendency from which I could not deviate my whole life through; namely, the tendency to turn into an image, into a poem, every thing that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some certain understanding with myself upon (467) it, that I might both rectify my conceptions of external things, and set my mind at rest about them. The faculty of doing this was necessary to no one more than to me, for my natural disposition whirled me constantly from one extreme to the other. All, therefore, that has been confessed by me, consists of fragments of a great confession; and this little book is an attempt which I have ventured on to render it complete. (468)

 

For since the heart always lies nearer to us than the head, and gives us trouble, whereas the latter knows how to set matters to rights, the affairs of the heart had always appeared to me as the most important. I was never weary of reflecting upon the transient nature of attachments, the mutability of human character, moral sensuality, and all the heights and depths, the combination of which in our nature may be considered as the riddle of human life. Here, too, I sought to get rid of that which troubled me, in a song, an epigram, in some kind of rhyme; which, since they referred to the most private feelings and the most peculiar circumstances, could scarcely interest any one but myself. (474)

 

In moral and religious, as well as in physical and civil, matters, man does not like to do any thing on the spur of the moment; he needs a sequence from which results habit; what he is to love and to perform, he cannot represent to himself as single or isolated; and, if he is to repeat any thing willingly, it must not have become strange to him. (476)

 

I was indeed conscious of having many failings, but no great faults; and that very consciousness diminished them, since it directed me to the moral strength which lay within me, and which, with resolution and perseverance, was at last to become master over the old Adam. (482)

 

The mind can be highly delighted in two ways,—by perception and conception. But the former demands a worthy object, which is not always at hand, and a proportionate culture, which one does not immediately attain. Conception, on the other hand, requires only susceptibility: it brings its subject-matter with it, and is itself the instrument of culture. (517)

 

But, could they have looked into my heart, they would have discovered no waggery there; for the truth of that old proverb, “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” had struck me with all its force: and the more I struggled to arrange and appropriate to myself what I had seen, the less I succeeded. I had at last to content myself with a silent after-operation. Ordinary life carried me away again (530) 

 

But as when the concert of our souls is most spiritually attuned, the rude, shrieking tones of the world usually break in most violently and boisterously, and the contrast which has gone on exercising a secret control affects us so much the more sensibly when it comes forward all at once (547)

 

My disquiet, my impatience, my striving, my seeking, investigating, musing, and wavering, she interpreted in her own way, and did not conceal from me her conviction, but assured me in plain terms that all this proceeded from my having no reconciled God. Now, I had believed from my youth upwards that I stood on very good terms with my God,—nay, I even fancied to myself, according to various experiences, that he might even be in arrears to me; and I was daring enough to think that I had something to forgive him. This presumption was grounded on my infinite good will, to which, as it seemed to me, he should have given better assistance. (557)

 

Nothing reveals more with respect to ourselves, than when we again see before us that which has proceeded from us years before, so that we can now consider ourselves as an object of contemplation. (564)

 

Time is infinitely long; and each day is a vessel into which a great deal may be poured, if one would actually fill it up. (568)

 

It is, indeed, a tedious, and withal a melancholy, business to take too much care of ourselves, and of what injures and benefits us; but there is no question but that, with the wonderful idiosyncrasy of human nature on the one side, and the infinite variety in the mode of life and pleasure on the other, it is a wonder that the human race has not worn itself out long ago. Human nature appears to possess a peculiar kind of toughness and manysidedness, since it subdues every thing which approaches it, or which it takes into itself, and, if it cannot assimilate, at least makes it indifferent. (570)

 

Such a fresh glance into a new land in which we are to abide for a time, has still the peculiarity, both pleasant (583) and foreboding, that the whole lies before us like an unwritten tablet. As yet no sorrows and joys which relate to ourselves are recorded upon it; this cheerful, varied, animated plain is still mute for us; the eye is only fixed on the objects so far as they are intrinsically important, and neither affection nor passion has especially to render prominent this or that spot. But a presentiment of the future already disquiets the young heart; and an unsatisfied craving secretly demands that which is to come and may come, and which at all events, whether for good or ill, will imperceptibly assume the character of the spot in which we find ourselves. (584)

 

Real life frequently loses its brilliancy to such a degree, that one is many a time forced to polish it up again with the varnish of fiction. (597)

 

In my efforts to free myself from the pressure of the too gloomy and powerful, which continued to rule within me, and seemed to me sometimes as strength, sometimes as weakness, I was thoroughly assisted by that open, social, stirring manner of life, which attracted me more and more, to which I accustomed myself, and which I at last learned to enjoy with perfect freedom. It is not difficult to remark in the world, that man feels himself most freely and most perfectly rid of his own feelings when he represents to himself the faults of others, and (610) expatiates upon them with complacent censoriousness. It is a tolerably pleasant sensation even to set ourselves above our equals by disapprobation and misrepresentation; for which reason good society, whether it consists of few or many, is most delighted with it. But nothing equals the comfortable selfcomplacency, when we erect ourselves into judges of our superiors, and of those who are set over us,—of princes and statesmen, —when we find public institutions unfit and injudicious, only consider the possible and actual obstacles, and recognize neither the greatness of the invention, nor the co-operation which is to be expected from time and circumstances in every undertaking.

(611)

 

Our wishes are presentiments of the capabilities which lie within us, and harbingers of that which we shall be in a condition to perform. Whatever we are able and would like to do, presents itself to our imagination, as without us and in the future. We feel a longing after that which we already possess in secret. Thus a passionate anticipating grasp changes the truly possible into a dreamed reality. (628)