Quotes from Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.

Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!

What way should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?— All the sixty-four radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts, and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour of arriving.

And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.

[H]e sang words without sense, but their tone went to his heart...

[Victor's] heart was on the sunny side of love...

[H]e ran, he stopped—he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring.

And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which penetrated even to the remotest brother.... his heart adhered everywhere like hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other being's lot.

But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours into his soul... a soft intoxication, which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude around his soul.

Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!—ah, if he could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,—could have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!

A scholar knows no boredom.

Every man has a rainy corner of his life whence comes foul weather which follows him.

Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

The guardian angels of life sometimes fly so high as to be beyond our sight, but they are always looking down upon us.

The Fates and Furies, as well as the Graces and Sirens, glide with linked hands over life.

How alone everyone is in the vast tomb of the universe!

On the church vaulting above was the clock-face of eternity, void of number and serving as its own hand, only one black finger was pointing and the dead wanted to tell the time by it.