“ Men gibe and jest. They see how hollow life is, and also how truth rings true. Love is here, sacred and revered, in forms pure and holy; and not less, that foul pool decked with beauty in which Greek manhood lost its masculine virtue.
Half a century before Christ, when Greek life overspread the eastern Mediterranean, and in every market-place Greek was the tongue of trade, of learning, and of gentle breeding, Greek letters grew conscious of its own riches. For six centuries and more, or as long as separates us from Chaucer, men had been writing these brief epigrams. ”

“ All circumstances tend one way, and hurry to revenge; in vain! Neither earthly nor infernal thing may bring about what is reserved for Fate alone. The hour of judgment comes: the wicked falls with the good; one race is mowed away, that another may spring up."
After a pause, in which they looked at one another, Serlo said: "You pay no great compliment to Providence, in thus exalting Shakespeare; and besides, it appears to me that for the honor of your poet, as others for the honor of Providence, you ascribe to him an object and a plan which he himself had never thought of." ”

“ I sincerely regret the more valuable libraries which have been involved in the ruin of the Roman Empire; but when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, the waste of ignorance, and the calamities of war, our treasures, rather than our losses, are the objects of my surprise. Many curious and interesting facts are buried in oblivion; the three great historians of Rome have been transmitted to our hands in a mutilated state, and we are deprived of many pleasing compositions of the lyric, iambic, and dramatic poetry of the Greeks. ”

“ For his works are in many respects among the prodigies of literature; in some, they have never been surpassed. As lights that have shone through the whole universe of letters, they have made their title to a place in the solid firmament of fame. But the tree is greater and better than its fruit; and greater and better yet than the works themselves are the lofty aims and conceptions, the large heart, the independent, manful mind, the pure and noble career, which in this Biography have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote them. ”

“ Thornhill one of the most happy men in the world.
"Why, let him if he can," returned I; "but my son, observe this bed of straw and unsheltering roof, those moldering walls and humid floor, my wretched body thus disabled by fire, and my children weeping round me for bread. You have come home, my child, to all this; yet here, even here, you see a man that would not for a thousand worlds exchange situations. O my children, if you could but learn to commune with your own hearts, and know what noble company you can make them, you would little regard the elegance and splendor of the worthless. ”

“ It is only by infecting his blood with the witch's poison that Mephistopheles can lay hold of the spirit of Faust even for a time; and had he not seen in the mirror that vision of Helena, whom he rightly loves, and whom indeed he needs, he could not have put to his lips the filthy brewage of the witch. But now indeed he is snared; the poison rages in his veins; for one hour he is transformed into what the world basely calls a man of pleasure. Yet Faust is not wholly lost: his better self, the untrained, untamed idealist, begins to reassert its power ”

“ In Garókhavaya Street, in one of those immense houses the population of which would suffice for a whole provincial city, there lay one morning in bed in his apartment Ílya Ílyitch Oblómof. He was a pleasant-appearing man of two or three and twenty, of medium stature, with dark gray eyes; but his face lacked any fixed idea or concentration of purpose. A thought would wander like a free bird over his features, flutter in his eyes, light on his parted lips, hide itself in the wrinkles of his brow, then entirely vanish away ”

“ I have learned from philosophy how much the soul is more excellent than the body; and that the separation of the nobler substance should be the subject of joy rather than of affliction. I have learned from religion that an earthly death has often been the reward of piety; and I accept, as a favor of the gods, the mortal stroke that secures me from the danger of disgracing a character which has hitherto been supported by virtue and fortitude. I die without remorse, as I have lived without guilt. ”

“ As the epic impulse faded, and before Greek genius for tragedy rose, the same race and dialect which had given epic narrative the proud, full verse that filled like a sail to zephyr and to storm alike, devised the elegiac couplet. With its opening even flow, its swifter rush in the second line, and its abrupt pause, it was a medium in which not narrative but man spoke, whether personal in passion, or impersonal in the dedication of a statue, or in epitaph. ”

“ The unity of God is an idea most congenial to nature and reason; and a slight conversation with the Jews and Christians would teach him to despise and detest the idolatry of Mecca. It was the duty of a man and a citizen to impart the doctrine of salvation, to rescue his country from the dominion of sin and error. The energy of a mind incessantly bent on the same object would convert a general obligation into a particular call; the warm suggestions of the understanding or the fancy would be felt as the inspirations of Heaven; the labor of thought would expire in rapture and vision ”

“ Our fancy may create or adopt a pleasing romance: that the Goths and Vandals sallied from Scandinavia, ardent to avenge the flight of Odin, to break the chains and to chastise the oppressors of mankind; that they wished to burn the records of classic literature, and to found their national architecture on the broken members of the Tuscan and Corinthian orders. But in simple truth, the Northern conquerors were neither sufficiently savage nor sufficiently refined to entertain such aspiring ideas of destruction and revenge. ”

“ Rousseau's undisciplined sensibility, morbidly excited by the harshness or imagined harshness of his fellows, by bodily torment, by broodings in solitude, became at last one quivering mass of disease. "No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid." What a contrast to the closing scenes of Goethe's life in that house of his, like a modest temple of the Muses, listening to Plutarch read aloud by his daughter-in-law, or serenely active, "ohne Hast aber ohne Rast" (without haste, but without rest) , in widening his sympathies with men or enlarging his knowledge of nature. ”

“ The quality of verse that fills the inn album to-day we all know; but Greek life was so compact of form and thought that even this unknown traveler's verse, scrawled with a stylus, still thrills, still rings, as the statue still sounds its ancient note.
In this long succession of short poems is delineated the Greek character, not of Athens but of the whole circle of the Mediterranean. The sphered life of the race is in its subjects. Each great Greek victory has its epigrams. In them, statues have an immortal life denied to marble and to bronze. ”

“ But while they displayed the vigor and freshness of youth, the founder prepared to celebrate the dedication of his city. The games and largesses which crowned the pomp of this memorable festival may easily be supposed; but there is one circumstance of a more singular and permanent nature which ought not entirely to be overlooked. As often as the birthday of the city returned, the statue of Constantine, framed by his order, of gilt wood, and bearing in its right hand a small image of the genius of the place, was erected on a triumphal car. ”

“ A complex figure of various and minute parts is more accessible to injury and decay; and the silent lapse of time is often accelerated by hurricanes and earthquakes, by fires and inundations. The air and earth have doubtless been shaken, and the lofty turrets of Rome have tottered from their foundations, but the seven hills do not appear to be placed on the great cavities of the globe; nor has the city in any age been exposed to the convulsions of nature which in the climate of Antioch, Lisbon, or Lima, have crumbled in a few moments the works of ages in the dust. ”

“ Assar said, "It is too heavy a sacrifice for so great a king as thee. Their wise men assert that God has given them the country for a possession, and it would be necessary for thee not only to allow them to worship their God, but also to call back thy men and make a covenant with them so that they should merely pay a tribute to thee. But this is more than I can advise."
The King answered, "Much does a man give for his life. Dost thou believe that he is a great God?"
"I have seen a great proof of it, lord."
"What is that?"
"This: that even a greatness like thine was as nothing to his." ”

“ MIGNON'S LOVE AND LONGING From 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.' Carlyle's Translation
Nothing is more touching than the first disclosure of a love which has been nursed in silence; of a faith grown strong in secret, and which at last comes forth in the hour of need and reveals itself to him who formerly has reckoned it of small account. The bud which had been closed so long and firmly was now ripe to burst its swathings, and Wilhelm's heart could never have been readier to welcome the impressions of affection. ”

“ Heine's works are canonical books for the intellectual, who season their judgments with citations from this poet, model their conversation on his style, interpret him, expand the germ cell of his wit to a whole fabric of clever developments. Even if he is not a companion on the way through life, like great German poets, and smaller Brahmins who for every day of our house-and-life calendar give us an aphorism on the road, there are nevertheless, in the lives of most modern men, moods with which Heine's verse harmonize with wondrous sympathy ”

“ I cannot recollect that any book, any man, any incident of my life, has produced such important effects on me, as the precious works to which by your kindness I have been directed. They seem as if they were performances of some celestial genius descending among men, to make them by the mildest instructions acquainted with themselves. They are no fictions! You would think, while reading them, you stood before the inclosed awful Books of Fate, while the whirlwind of most impassioned life was howling through the leaves, and tossing them fiercely to and fro. ”

“ His men appear like natural men, and yet they are not. These, the most mysterious and complex productions of creation, here act before us as if they were watches, whose dial-plates and cases were of crystal, which pointed out according to their use the course of the hours and minutes; while at the same time you could discern the combination of wheels and springs that turn them. The few glances I have cast over Shakespeare's world incite me, more than anything beside, to quicken my footsteps forward into the actual world, to mingle in the flood of destinies that is suspended over it ”

“ The elevation of Odenathus and Zenobia appeared to reflect new splendor on their country, and Palmyra for a while stood forth the rival of Rome: but the competition was fatal, and ages of prosperity were sacrificed to a moment of glory.
In his march over the sandy desert between Emesa and Palmyra, the Emperor Aurelian was perpetually harassed by the Arabs; nor could he always defend his army, and especially his baggage, from those flying troops of active and daring robbers who watched the moment of surprise and eluded the slow pursuit of the legions. ”

“ The prospect of beauty, of safety, and of wealth, united in a single spot, was sufficient to justify the choice of Constantine. But as some decent mixture of prodigy and fable has in every age been supposed to reflect a becoming majesty on the origin of great cities, the Emperor was desirous of ascribing his resolution, not so much to the uncertain counsels of human policy as to the infallible and eternal decrees of Divine wisdom. ”

“ What unity can such a work possess, except that which comes from the fact that it all proceeded from a single mind, and that some main threads of thought—for it would be rash to speak of a ground idea—run through the several parts and bind them together? 'Faust' has not the unity of a lake whose circuit the eye can contemplate, a crystal set among the hills. ”

“ MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS From 'Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.' Translation of Bailey Saunders. Copyright 1892, by Macmillan & Co.
It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape: it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.
I must hold it for the greatest calamity of our time, which lets nothing come to maturity, that one moment is consumed by the next, and the day spent in the day; so that a man is always living from hand to mouth, without having anything to show for it. ”

“ In the life of Augustus we behold the tyrant of the republic converted, almost by imperceptible degrees, into the father of his country and of human kind. In that of Constantine we may contemplate a hero who had so long inspired his subjects with love and his enemies with terror, degenerating into a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation. The general peace which he maintained during the last fourteen years of his reign was a period of apparent splendor rather than of real prosperity ”

“ Oblómof's complexion was not florid, not tawny, and not positively pallid, but was indeterminate,—or seemed to be so, perhaps because it was flabby; not by reason of age, but by lack of exercise or of fresh air or of both. His body, to judge by the dull, transparent color of his neck, by his little plump hands, his drooping shoulders, seemed too effeminate for a man. His movements, even if by chance he were aroused, were kept under restraint likewise by a languor and by a laziness that was not devoid of its own peculiar grace. ”

“ The criticism of my pieces may have the correction and improvement of comedy in view; but the criticism of my Memoirs will be of no advantage to literature. However, if any writer should think proper to employ his time on me for the sole purpose of vexing me, he would lose his labor. I am of a pacific disposition; I have always preserved my coolness of character; at my age I read little, and I read only amusing books. ”