Johann Gottfried Herder Quotes

Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.

We live in a world we ourselves create.

Everyone loves his own country, customs, language, wife, children, not because they are the best in the world, but because they are his established property, and he loves in them himself, and the labor he has bestowed on them. The working of revolutions, therefore, misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.

Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity.

To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.

A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.

Those that embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part love nothing, but their narrow selves.

Touch not the flute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent.

What destiny sends, bear! Whoever perseveres will be crowned.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

The friend who holds up before me the mirror, conceals not my smallest faults, warns me kindly, reproves me affectionately, when I have not performed my duty, he is my friend, however little he may appear so. But if a man praises and lauds me, never reproves me, overlooks my faults, and forgives them before I have repented, he is my enemy, however much he may appear my friend.

Brave is the lion tamer, brave is the world subduer, but braver is the one who has subdued himself.

Say oh wise man how you have come to such knowledge? Because I was never ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others.

The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species

All our science calculates with abstracted individual external marks, which do not touch the inner existence of any single thing

It is easier to make a lady of a peasant-girl than a peasant-girl of a lady.

Nothing in Nature stands still; everything strives and moves forward. If we could only view the first stages of creation, how the kingdoms of nature were built one upon the other, a progression of forward-striving forces would reveal itself in all evolution.

The craving for a delicate fruit is pleasanter than the fruit itself.

Have you never observed that children will sometimes, of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them? Which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings? Which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground?

Calmly take what ill betideth; Patience wins the crown at length: Rich repayment him abideth Who endures in quiet strength. Brave the tamer of the lion; Brave whom conquered kingdoms praise; Bravest he who rules his passions, Who his own impatience sways.

It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out.

The working of revolutions misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.

Thus we build on the ice, thus we write on the waves of the sea; the waves roaring pass away, the ice melts, and away goes our palace, like our thoughts.

Jesus Christ is, in the noblest and most perfect sense, the realized ideal of humanity.

As the shadow in early morning, is friendship with the wicked; it dwindles hour by hour. But friendship with the good increases, like the evening shadows, till the sun of life sets.