"Lessing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... religion, is really a practical religionist, and, although he may subscribe to no outer ceremonial form or dogma, his life is such that a Confucian, a Buddhist, a Christian, or a Hebrew can behold in him the practitioner of the essence of either of their religions,—a conception carried out by Lessing, in his play of "Nathan the Wise," where the Jew, the Saracen, and Crusader teach the impressive lesson that nobleness is bound by no confession of faith or religion; showing the principle ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... finite, we have no knowledge of the Infinite, the Absolute. Schiller, not satisfied with the mere fact, in this poem expresses the conviction that there must be an ethical reason for this necessity, a reason that is beyond our ken. Compare also the beautiful words of Lessing: "Nicht die Wahrheit, in deren Besitz irgend ein Mensch ist, oder zu sein vermeinet, sondern die aufrichtige Muehe, die er angewandt hat, hinter die Wahrheit zu kommen, macht den Wert des Menschen. Denn nicht ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... was quite as serious in saying that Mercury carried him out of the melee in a cloud, like one of Homer's heroes, as that he had left his shield discreditably (non bene) on the battle-field. But it requires a poetic sympathy, which in classical editors is rare, to understand that, as Lessing and others have urged, the very way he speaks of his own retreat was by implication a compliment, not ungraceful, to his friend, who had continued the struggle against the triumvirate, and come home at last, war-worn and weary, to find the more politic comrade of his ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... which raged between Richard Bentley and his opponents concerning the authenticity of the "Epistles of Phalaris," nor how literary Germany was divided into two hostile camps by Wolf's attack on the personality of Homer. It is no less fresh in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter, Lessing, waged a long and bitter battle with the Titans of the French classical drama, and finally crushed them with the thunderbolt of the "Dramaturgie;" nor what acrimony sharpened the discussion between the rival theorists in music, Gluck and Piccini, at Paris. All of the intensity of these ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the century produced a remarkable effect, and emphasized the interest in landscape painting already growing in France, and later so splendidly developed by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and their celebrated contemporaries. In Germany the Achenbachs, Lessing, and many other artists were active in this movement, while in America, Innes, A. H. Wyant, and Homer Martin, with numerous followers, were raising landscape art to an eminence ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... morn as through Hyde Park we walk'd, My friend and I, by chance we talk'd Of Lessing's famed Laocooen; And after we awhile had gone In Lessing's track, and tried to see What painting is, what poetry— Diverging to another thought, "Ah," cries my friend, "but who hath taught Why music and the other arts Oftener perform aright their parts Than poetry? why she, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the decay; the essentially bourgeois and commonplace taste of Colbert and the influence of his artistic henchman, Lebrun; the slavish worship of Graeco-Roman and Roman models, fostered by the creation of the Ecole de Rome; and the teachings of critics like Lessing and Winkelmann, who drew their inspiration not from pure Greek models, but from the decadent and sterile art of the Empire, stored in the Vatican. Among the artists whose individuality stands forth from the mass of sculptures in these rooms is Charles Antoine ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a "German taste," which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. Lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much, and was versed in many things; he who was not the translator of Bayle to no purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow of Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM, a German author, and founder of modern German literature, born at Kamenz, Saxony, son of the pastor there; sent to study theology at Leipzig, studied hard; conceived a passion for the stage; wrote plays ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... love from lust—the mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration, sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characters says: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is inconceivable to me, would be my death"—we still hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... little sore about your not caring to stand by Hubers. But I suppose I had better see the president about all that. He gets home next week? And, come to think of it, I'm pretty close to a couple of members of the board. I operated on both Lessing and Tyler. Both of those fellows have a notion they owe their lives to me. That makes people feel rather close to one, you know. But then, of course, you don't know—why should you? And, dear me—there's that rich old patient ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... earnestly, still more frequently did she turn to the study of men. Authors and their personages were not ideal beings merely, but full of human blood and life. So living men and women were idealized again, and transfigured by her rapid fancy,—every trait intensified, developed, ennobled. Lessing says that "The true portrait painter will paint his subject, flattering him as art ought to flatter,—painting the face not as it actually is, but as creation designed, omitting the imperfections arising from the resistance of the material ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Lessing has advanced excellent reasons for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on the planet Venus. Seven months ago now, Venus and Mars were in alignment with the sun; that is to say, Mars was ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Of Voltaire's illiberal attacks upon the Jews, and of the King of Prussia's intolerance towards them, he could not express sufficient detestation; nor could he ever adequately extol Cumberland's benevolent "Jew," or Lessing's "Nathan the Wise." Quotations from one or the other were continually in readiness, uttered with all the air of a man so deeply impressed with certain sentiments, that they involuntarily burst from him on every occasion. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... his literary remains a work published in 1840 under the title of Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit. What is here written is largely upon the basis of intuition and forecast like that of Remarus and Lessing a half-century earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... humor with their own understanding. You might teach him the mad dance, set to the mad howl. Madge Owlet would be nothing to him. "My, how he capers!" (In the margin is written "One of the children speaks this.") ... What I scratch out is a German quotation, from Lessing, on the bite of rabid animals; but I remember you don't read German. But Mrs. P. may, so I wish I had let it stand. The meaning in English is: "Avoid to approach an animal suspected of madness, as you would avoid fire or a precipice,"—which I think is a sensible observation. ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Theory, History, and Practice of Criticism, with special attention to Aristotle, Boileau, Lessing, and English and later French writers, and a study of the great works of ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Europeans of eminence have let their minds play with the ideas of metempsychosis, pre-existence and karma, as for instance Giordano Bruno, Swedenborg, Goethe, Lessing, Lavater, Herder, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, von Helmont, Lichtenberg and in England such different spirits as Hume and Wordsworth. It would appear that towards the end of the eighteenth century these ideas were popular in some literary circles on the continent. See Bertholet, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... awakened by the somewhat familiar view of an elderly gentleman asleep under the influence of a sermon on a drowsy mid-summer day. Writing to his father from Fort Boykin, he asks him to "seize at any price volumes of Uhland, Lessing, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... the Journal, which opens with a quotation from Novalis: "Philosophy can bake no bread; but it can prove for us God, freedom, and immortality. Which, now, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?" Later comes a quotation from Lessing, which involved a cardinal principle that he claimed for himself, and demanded of his pupils: accept no authority without ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... Lessing, by James Sime, is not a great biography, but it is an interesting and most profitable study of a noble man. Lessing will be an inspiration greater almost than any other of the moderns for those who are brought in contact with his fine personality. The book is in 2 volumes, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... of consideration he thanked God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. "Wer nur selbst was hatte," says Lessing's Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, "mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!" This ideal of the well-born man without possessions was embodied in knight-errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the military ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the first step in history. This step was taken in Europe at the end of the last century when the imagination took fresh flight under the auspices of Lessing and Walter Scott, and a little later in France under Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and others. We now come to the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... advanced portion of psychology—the Emotions. The German philosophers have usually ranked aesthetics as one of the subjective sciences; but, it is only of late that the department has taken shape in their country. Lessing gave a great impulse to literary art, and originated a number of pregnant suggestions; and the German love of music has necessarily led to theories as well as to compositions. We are now in the way to that consummation of aesthetics which may be described as containing (1) a reference ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... disclosed to him! To Lucy Grey, who wore pensive curls, and had a sweet voice, he presented constantly fragrant little sprays of mignonette, cunning moss baskets with a suspicion of heliotrope peeping out, and crushed myrtle blossoms between the leaves of her most exquisitely bound books. To Katy Lessing, who rowed a small green boat somewhere up the Hudson in the summer, he confided the fact that water lilies were his admiration: he loved the limpid water; its restless waves were like heart throbbings (this nearly overwhelmed poor Katy). All ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... greatness of England is largely built, and it will not take us long to discover that Bushido does not stand on a lesser pedestal. If fighting in itself, be it offensive or defensive, is, as Quakers rightly testify, brutal and wrong, we can still say with Lessing, "We know from what failings our virtue springs."[3] "Sneaks" and "cowards" are epithets of the worst opprobrium to healthy, simple natures. Childhood begins life with these notions, and knighthood also; but, as life ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... his powers, or to found national impression; Lichtenberg, though a very sagacious observer, never rose into what can be called a power, he did not modify his age; yet these were both men of extraordinary talent, and Burger a man of undoubted genius. On the other hand, Lessing was merely a man of talent, but of talent in the highest degree adapted to popularity. His very defects, and the shallowness of his philosophy, promoted his popularity; and by comparison with the French critics on the dramatic ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... as a historical and critical discipline had its origin in the last century through the works of Mosheim, C. W. F. Walch, Ernesti, Lessing and Semler. Lange gave to the world in 1796 the first attempt at a history of dogma as a special branch of theological study. The theologians of the Early and Mediaeval Churches have only transmitted histories of Heretics and of Literature, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... great German and Swiss specialists in pedagogy and psychology, Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak. I will only mention that the greatest men of Germany, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Kant and others, took the side of natural training. In regard to England it is well known that John Locke in his Thoughts on Education, was a worthy predecessor of Herbert Spencer, whose book on education in its ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... poetry is lacking in finish and artistic beauty. He was an earnest social reformer; he endeavoured, by means of his settlement system, to solve the social problem; and his efforts to uplift the working classes were praised by the famous German critic, Lessing. The historian and theologian, Albrecht Ritschl, has accused him of sectarian motives and of wilfully creating a split in the Lutheran Church. The accusation is absolutely false. There is nothing more attractive in the character ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... as a good man as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy—Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder—the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland. Prose Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Herder, Kant. Poets of the Nineteenth ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... an old remark of Lessing, often repeated, but nevertheless true, that Frenchmen, as a general rule, are sadly deficient in the mental powers suited to objective observation, and therefore eminently disqualified for reliable reports of travels. Among the host of French ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Six years later Lessing's pamphlet on the Education of the Human Race appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to a modern reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in argumentative force. The thesis is that the drama of history is to be explained as the education of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Teufel bey'm Haare packen, so hat Er Dich bey'm Kopfe, says Lessing, and so it may become here with this first success of the pretorians, or even worse than pretorians; these here ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... as those who had been trained to take notes and recite from them. I had been told that the teacher in charge of this class was one of the most excellent in the city. The hour was occupied by a lecture on Lessing, a poet whom the class were evidently ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... often exaggerated ideals of what might be possible to humanity. Lastly, there remains to notice the very important influence exercised upon English thought by Coleridge, not only by the force of his own somewhat mystic temperament, but by his familiarity with such writers as Kant, Lessing, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, who had studied far more profoundly than any English philosophers or theologians, the relation of man's higher understanding to matters not cognisable by the ordinary powers ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... celebrated—trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... brought in. Pfeffel makes his "Bramine" read a lesson to bigots; Matthias Claudius in his well-known poem makes Herr Urian pay a visit to the Great Mogul; Buerger, in his salacious story of the queen of Golkonde, transports the lovers to India; Lessing, in "Minna von Barnhelm" (Act i. Sc. 12) represents Werner as intending to take service with Prince Heraklius of Persia, and he chooses an Oriental setting ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... discouragement. My studies at this period were mainly in the direction of history, though with considerable reading on art and literature. Valuable and interesting to me at this time were the representations of the best dramas of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Gutzkow, at the Berlin theaters. Then, too, really began my education in Shakspere, and the representations of his plays (in Schlegel and Tieck's version) were, on the whole, the most satisfactory I have ever known. I thus heard plays of Shakspere which, in English-speaking countries, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... victory. As soon as that is achieved, we have had enough of the spectacle. So it is in play, so it is in the search for truth. We never pursue objects, but we pursue the pursuit of objects." But no one has stated it more boldly than Lessing when he wrote: "If God held in his right hand all truth, and in his left the one unceasingly active desire for truth, although bound up with the law that I should forever err, I should choose with humility the left and say: 'Give me this, Father. The pure truth is for thee alone.'"[56-1] The pleasure ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... this reaffirmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of truth; a faith that lost and regained itself in life; it was dynamic in its operation; for, as Lessing said, the searching after truth, and not its possession, gives happiness to man. In the words of an American scientist, taken from his book on Heredity, "The evolutionary idea has forced man to consider the probable future of his own race on earth ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
