Quotes from Franz Grillparzer

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.

Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers--his hopes.

Woman is the crown of all creation, but Man is the head who wears it, and even the servant is master in his house.

Feeling and thinking are actually the blind man who carries the lame.

Man lives two lives, woe, were it otherwise! One is seized by death, the other one, his honor, remains.

Distinctly different as a child, as an adolescent, in his prime and in his old age, man considers himself as one, not because he acts, but because he knows.

The noble woman is half a man, even a complete one. Only their imperfections make them women.

Much as I honor the wisdom of the princess--there is something more dashing about a man.

Man will return to his origins. Goethe has finally become as squiggly as the city of his fathers.

A man may welcome his beloved with circumstance, but a woman's love and her concern for his well-being are discreet.

In the long run, only woman remains true to mankind's foremost mission. Whatever she achieves, she achieves through herself, and alone. Man's master is the--public.

Who could deny that our Austria is richer than any other country? As the saying goes: "We have money like manure.

There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.

I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.

A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.

I've never been on good terms with God, but now I'm becoming His intimate, for He is truly absolute and extremely legitimate.

The thing that pleases is not always good and, helas, the good thing does not always please.