Schiller Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

“If you think you’re doing some charity work with me… something altruistic by taking pity on poor little Lanie, get over it now, mister—”

Her fork flew right out of her hand, past Kyle’s shoulder. She sat there for a second staring disbelievingly at her empty hand. Then she narrowed her eyes at Kyle and snatched the fork out of his hand and used it.
-“That’s my fork, Lanie.”
-“Fork you, Kyle,”
― M.K. Schiller, The Do-Over

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller's, or Dostoevsky's, or even Socrates’, whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Bei uns wird nur selten eine Mariage geschlossen, wo nicht wenigstens ein halb Dutzend der Gäste - oder der Aufwärter- das Paradies des Bräutigams geometrisch ermessen kann.”
― Friedrich Schiller, Kabale und Liebe

“Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller.”
― David Markson

“Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment—an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness.”
― Friedrich Holderlin, Odes and Elegies

“Erhob sich nicht in meinem Parlamente
Die reine Stimme der Gerechtigkeit?"
"Sie ist verstummt vor der Parteien Wut.”
― Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans

“I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves. Do you really believe the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish?”
― Fred Uhlman, Reunion

“[Don Carlos] will always remain open-ended, asking to be fleshed out by the imagination of others, silently demanding a finale of his authors, no matter how fantastical.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions

“Such immediate sliding into fiction under the guise of history reveals a remarkable fluidity between history and fiction that, while pertinent to innumerable portrayals of historical personages of other eras and nationalities, seems to acquire a particularly transformational narrative power in the case of Don Carlos.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions

“Thus, "Nenne mich Du" might be the emblematic phrase of this character: the Infante's invitation - in Schiller's words - to both creators and readers/audiences to 'name' him beyond his historical identifier Don Carlos - and all of its variants of Dom Carlos, Don Karlos, Don Carlo. Naming him, in this case, does not mean giving him another name, but calling him into being, endowing him with an identity shaped by an envisioned course of events and actions that lead to an ending. This phrase represents the mystery behind the character and Schiller's disclaimer that what the public is reading or seeing can never be the real Don Karlos - history's Don Carlos remains, largely, an unknown.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions