Jean Paul

"How calmly may we commit ourselves to the hands of Him who bears up the world!"

"The life of Christ concerns Him who, being the holiest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages."

"When Antipater demanded fifty children as hostages from the Spartans, they offered him, in their stead, a hundred men of distinction; unlike ordinary educators, who precisely reverse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly and nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands before us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised land, may only gaze, but not enter."

"Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life."

"A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward."

"Die Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies, aus welchem wir nicht getrieben werden können."

"The virtues, like the body, become strong more by labor than by nourishment."

"The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven."

"When in your last hour (think of this) all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away, and sink into inanity — imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment — then will the flower of belief, which blossoms even in the night, remain to refresh you with its fragrance in the last darkness."

"Has it never occurred to us, when surrounded by sorrows, that they may be sent to us only for our instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we wish to teach them to sing?"

"The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy."

"Lift thyself up, look. around, and see something higher and brighter than earth, earthworms, and earthly darkness."