Various

“ What value has the civilization and illumination of a people whose existence is reckoned by seconds, of a little heap of pulverized colophony, which blazes and shines while it is blown through the flame of life? And can the dead pseudo-immortality of libraries and museums, which resides and is reflected in the transient blaze of the quickly consumed witch-meal [15] , give warmth and soul to a life exposed to an eternal extinction often before its short seconds are lived out and fulfilled? ”

“ As we behold the unfinished manuscript of that work laid upon Jean Paul's bier by his mourning friends and admirers, we seem to see the soul, which in its flight from its earthly tenement left behind these fragments of its inward workings, passing over the threshold of the unseen world with that mighty question on its lips, there to receive a full and an eternal answer. ”

“ On the whole, I find fewer men than is supposed, who decidedly either believe or deny a future existence. They that venture to deny it, are exceedingly few, because without it the present existence would lose all unity, character, completeness, and hope; and equally few are they who venture to assume it, because they are affrighted at the thought of their own translation into glory, and of the dying away of the diminished earth. Most men are tossed up and down midway between the two opinions, in poetic vagueness, by the impulse of alternating feelings. ”

“ Sadness bears no resemblance to tears, confusion none to the blood which is ebbing in the cheeks, wit none to champagne, the idea of this valley none to the miniature sketch of it on our retina. The inner man, the veiled god in the statue, is not of stone like the statue itself; his living members grow and ripen by a mysterious process of life within the stony limbs of the outer man. We do not sufficiently take notice of the influence which, in fact, the inner man has upon the outer man in restraining and moulding him ”

“ No doubt it is this dissimilarity of the future world to the present, the very incommensurability of its greatness, that has made so many unbelievers in it. It is not the bursting of the larva-skin of our body in death, but the distance between our future spring and our present autumn, which throws so many doubts into our poor heart. ”

“ In the answer to them he was overtaken by the hand of death; his work remained unfinished on the earth, and his truth-thirsting soul was removed out of this world, which was to him a state of darkness and conjecture, into that world in which all the questions of life are answered, and all its riddles solved; that world to the existence of which, and its connexion with the present; Jean Paul himself bore testimony when he said, that "somewhere there must be resting on the earth a heavenly ladder, whose top reaches up far beyond the most distant stars." ”

“ I look out over the shaded flower-meads, and remind myself that over them six thousand years have passed with their high and noble men, whom none of us had the opportunity of pressing to his heart; that many thousand years more may yet follow, leading over them men of heavenly, perhaps sorrowful, minds, who will never meet us, but at most our urns, and whom we should be so glad to love; and that only a few poor decades of years bring before us a few fleeting forms, which turn their eyes towards us, and bear within them the brother-heart for which we are longing. ”

“ Alas! in this dangerous winter night of life; in this chaotic multitude of unknown beings separated from us, some by depth and some by height, in this world of mysteries, this tremulous twilight which enwraps our little ball of flying dust,—how is it possible that lone man should not embrace the only warm breast which bolds a heart like his own, and to which he can say, 'Thou art as I am, my brother; thou sufferest as I suffer, and we may love each other?' Incomprehensible man! ”

“ By thus listening for the light step of each idea, and forthwith shutting it up with others in a book,—by scraping from the brain every shooting crystal of thought, and inflating with words every dumb frog, the driest matter will swell into an octavo volume; every stone will be turned into an intellectual child, and into bread in the bargain; every head will become the patriarch of a sister-library, and fill its own book-case by its own fertility. ”

“ Indeed, it is not by the practice of the body only, but by its very theory; not only by the applied mathematics of its lusts, but by the pure science of the existence of a world of sense, that the holy, inly-diving look upon the inner world is necessarily obscured and obstructed to beings dwelling as yet in the outer world. The inner world is more easily comprehended only by moralists, metaphysicians, poets, nay, even by artists; the chymist, the physician, the mathematician wants for it telescopes and ear-tubes, and in course of time even eyes and ears. ”

“ The history of genius working out its powers under the pressure of worldly disadvantages, and struggling into greatness and fame through a long continuance or overwhelming adversity, is indeed an interesting and a highly-instructive theme: But still more interesting, and replete with instruction of a yet deeper sort, is the history of a mind groping through the darkness of human systems after the light of heaven's truth ”

“ Feelings, once morbid, drawn from the deepest depths of the human heart, and soarings, often presumptuous, of poetic fancy to the utmost boundaries of human thought, such are the ingredients of the religion which Emmanuel preaches and practises in his ascetic solitude, and the flame of which he keeps alive in the hearts of those under his influence, especially of Victor and Clotilda, the latter of whom alone, being a communicant of the Church, holds her high faith in a Christian form, and under the Christian name. ”

“ Let, at length, any one people attain the highest degree of science, of art, and of moral culture, in which later nations outstrip their predecessors, let in the last age the spiritual harvest and abundance accumulated through successive centuries be deposited in the human multitude of sound-figures: within fifty years the figures and the treasures vanish, and nothing remains but the fact that they have been. The light of creation and of its spirit is extinct ”

“ In this conflict the higher souls are victorious, but they can be so only by self-sacrifice: the thought that lies at the foundation, is an essentially Christian thought, but embodied in a poetic fiction: virtue is put in the place of Christ, and has both its passion and its resurrection. Hence the title "Hesperus," as signifying both the evening and the morning star; the whole being, in the wildest strains of German romance, an echo of that word of the Psalmist, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." ”

“ Nay, often the pupil robs the master, and cheats the world with his borrowed greatness, until the true sun rises and causes the moon to turn pale; or be locks up his stolen ware till the death of the owner, intending by patchwork of his own to prevent its being recognized even so a she-wolf once suckled Romulus, the son of a god. This accounts for the fact that an author is often so much worse than his book, and the child so unlike the father; that those who write for the amusement of a whole public of readers are often mute in society ”

“ The dream of human greatness and goodness is realized in the character of the hero; and whatever objections may be raised to the truth of the moral, as involving the fallacious doctrine of human perfectibility, it must be confessed that few of those who have attempted to embody that doctrine in fiction, have taken a loftier aim, or handled their pencil with greater boldness and effect, than Jean Paul in this, which, after all, stands out pre-eminent among all his writings as the master-work of his genius. ”

“ He is a visionary enthusiast, full of years, and rapidly approaching his death, of which he has a mysterious presentiment: he is introduced into the story as an impersonation of what was, to Jean Paul's conception, the highest and purest faith, great depth of religious sentiment, interwoven with a few scattered rays, and no more, of Christian truth, consuming itself in efforts to emancipate the soul from the trammels of earth, by the apprehension of a higher and a perfect state beyond the grave ”

“ Jean Paul's description of "the open starry sky," we seek in vain in the translation; and so we do Jean Paul's beautiful comparison of the stars above, to eyes twinkling to each other, "eye to eye, life to life," and so disclosing by their bright sheen to the mortal eye below "the world in deeper and deeper depth," all which the ill-starred translator understands of human eye meeting human eye, one living man with another living man, in "the outward living world." ”

“ Then must each individual, in the midst of his flight and effort to ennoble himself and others, be cast down by the thought that the injury done him by any chance gust of wind, may at any moment cause the tombstone to descend like a portcullis upon all his endeavours....
" If from dying nations we pass on to dying individuals, it is painful to the soul thoroughly to realize, even for a moment, love between those that are to perish. ”

“ As is not unfrequently the case with men, whom their high gifts and their singular energy or character mark as chosen instruments for the accomplishment of great moral and intellectual reforms, Jean Paul's literary and social career commenced with opposition against the existing state of things. For it is the manner, the instinct, so to speak, of men of that stamp to chant forth into the world, forcibly and without disguise, whatever is for the time being the key-note of their inner life ”

“ This inner world, which is yet more glorious and wonderful than the outer, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher world than that which is warmed by a sun. And therefore we say with truth, not the second earth or sphere, but the second world; that is, another world beyond this universe."— Kampaner Thal, s. ”

“ If the continual admixture and influx of the rising generation into that which is fading away, were not to impart to the latter a solid appearance of duration and continuity, turning it into a kind of electric jar of knowledge; if, without mixing with the next, the element of its renovation, each generation was in its turn to sink down like a swarm of day-flies from the beams of the evening sun into the water, all the brilliancy and splendour of the nations would appear to us only as the vanishing of glow-worms, which through the night describe their small orbit over the earth. ”

“ Nay, even the discrepancy occasioned by their opposite polarity, Siebenkäs being more inclined to forgive, Leibgeber to punish; the former being more of a Horatian satire, the latter more of an Aristophanic pasquil, full of unpoetic and poetic harshnesses,—is sufficient to account for their being suited as they were. But as female friendship rejoices in likeness of apparel, so their souls wore the undress and morning-suit of life,—their two bodies, I mean,—altogether of the same trim, colour, button-holes, lining, and cut ”

“ It is true, the whole vision forms part of a dream, and its object is not to inculcate atheism, but to combat it, by showing the utter desolation of heart and mind which atheism involves; but even this cannot reconcile us to a conceit so wild and strange, and, as we cannot help feeling, in spite of all the apologies by which Jean Paul prefaces it, so irreverent. ”

“ The conquests achieved by literary genius over the impenetrable dulness which is, in the most enlightened, as well as in the darkest ages, the portion of the general mass of humankind, are, like other great conquests, not the work of a moment: the day on which the victory is decided and proclaimed is preceded by many a conflict of doubtful issue, and many a forlorn hope has to be led on before a breach can be effected in the massive fortifications of intellectual impassibility. ”

“ And even this, that a man's hand reaches through so few years, and gets so few kind hands to lay hold of, must excuse him for writing a book: his voice reaches further than his hand; his love, hemmed in a narrow circle, diffuses itself into wider spheres; and when he himself is no more, still his thoughts hover, gently whispering, in the paper-foliage, whose rustling and shade, transient like other dreams, beguile the weary hours of many a far distant heart. ”

“ But the sport which he makes, though not uncongenial to the German mind, accustomed to speak and think on the highest and the most serious subjects with an alarming degree of freedom, is hardly suited to our English taste, or justifiable in the abstract; and Jean Paul himself was carried by the impulse which he had given to himself, so for beyond all the bounds within which poetic fancy should be restrained by religious awe, as to introduce Christ proclaiming from the summit of the universe the non-existence of a God. ”

“ The reason why we are less struck by the incomprehensible existence of these three transcendent celestial orbs is, that they are always banging before us, and that we foolishly imagine that we are creating them, whereas we only perceive them. What prototype, what plastic power have we, or what materials, to create such a spiritual world within ourselves? Let the atheist but ask himself how he came by the gigantic ideal of a Godhead which he either denies or materializes ”

“ Leibgeber. 'It strikes myself,' said I, as I was taking a cursory review of my system whilst bathing my feet, and looking significantly at my toes, the nails of which were being paired—'the I am the All and the Universe; it is impossible for me to become more in the world to the world itself, and God, and the spiritual world and the bargain. ”

“ On the ladder of truth which God has let down upon the earth out of heaven, some are ascending, while others are descending back again to their earthly systems of ignorance and error; those that ascend and those that descend may chance to meet on the same round, but it is manifest folly thence to conclude that they stand in the same relation to truth. ”