Wilhelm Von Humboldt Quotes

“I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Results are nothing; the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“It is an absolutely vain endeavor to attempt to reconstruct or even comprehend the nature of a human being by simply knowing the forces which have acted upon him. However deeply we should like to penetrate, however close we seem to be drawing to truth, one unknown quantity eludes us: man's primordial energy, his original self, that personality which was given him with the gift of life itself. On it rests man's true freedom; it alone determines his real character.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

All growth toward perfection is but a returning to original existence.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Faith can be interested in results only, for a truth once recognized as such puts an end to the believer's thinking.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“To judge a man means nothing other than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

The sum of the knowable, that soil which the human spirit must till, lies between all the languages and independent of them, at their center. But man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his own modes of cognition and feeling, in other words: subjectively. Just where study and research touch the highest and deepest point, just there does the mechanical, logical use of reason - whatever in us can most easily be separated from our uniqueness as individual human beings - find itself at the end of its rope. From here on we need a process of inner perception and creation. And all that we can plainly know about this is its result, namely, that objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The price of apparent happiness and enjoyment is the neglect of the spontaneous active energies of the acting members.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The best and noblest parts of man depend precious little on culture, education, and whatever else it is called. One can never have enough respect for true humanity as it is visible in the persons of the totally uneducated classes, and never enough humility if one sometimes believes one is superior to them.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a part of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Language makes infinite use of finite media.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue ... perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“To inquire and to create; these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Among men who are really free, every form of industry becomes more rapidly improved - all the arts flourish more gracefully - all the sciences extend their range.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The legislator should keep two things constantly before his eyes: 1. The pure theory developed to its minutest details; 2. The particular condition of actual things which he designs to reform.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

The very variety arising from the union of numbers of individuals is the highest good which social life can confer, and this variety is undoubtedly lost in proportion to the degree of State interference.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“When we are not too anxious about happiness and unhappiness, but devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, then happiness comes of itself
nay, even springs from the midst of a life of troubles and anxieties and privations.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The State is not in itself an end, but is only a means towards human development.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Governmental regulations all carry coercion to some degree, and even where they don't, they habituate man to expect teaching, guidance and help outside himself, instead of formulating his own.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“I lay very little stress either upon asking or giving advice. Generally speaking, they who ask advice know what they wish to do, and remain firm to their intentions. A man may allow himself to be enlightened on various points, even upon matters of expediency and duty; but, after all, he must determine his course of action, for himself.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Government, religion, property, books, are nothing but the scaffolding to build men. Earth holds up to her master no fruit like the finished man.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Life, in all ranks and situations, is an outward occupation, an actual and active work.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“In the moral world there is nothing impossible if we can bring a thorough will to it. Man can do everything with himself, but he must not attempt to do too much with others.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“It is a characteristic of old age to find the progress of time accelerated. The less one accomplishes in a given time, the shorter does the retrospect appear.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“It is almost more important how a person takes his fate than what it is. And the best way is with gratitude while trying to improve it for the good of others and themselves.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Man is naturally more disposed to beneficent than selfish actions. This we learn even from the history of savages. The domestic virtues have something in them so inviting and genial, and the public virtues of the citizen something so grand and inspiring, that even he who is barely uncorrupted, is seldom able to resist their charm.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

The sea has been called deceitful and treacherous, but there lies in this trait only the character of a great natural power, which, to speak according to our own feelings, renews its strength, and, without reference to joy or sorrow, follows eternal laws which are imposed by a higher Power.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

All political arrangements, in that they have to bring a variety of widely-discordant interests into unity and harmony, necessarily occasion manifold collisions. From these collisions spring misproportions between men's desires and their powers; and from these, transgressions. The more active the State is, the greater is the number of these.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Map reconciles himself to almost any event, however trying, if it happens in the ordinary course of nature. It is the extraordinary alone that he rebels against. There is a moral idea associated with this feeling; for the extraordinary appears to be something like an injustice of heaven.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Real inward devotion knows no prayer but that arising from the depths of its own feelings.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Women are in this respect more fortunate than men, that most of their employments are of such a nature that they can at the same time be thinking of quite different things.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“In every remodelling of the present, the existing condition of things must be supplanted by a new one. Now every variety of circumstances in which men find themselves, every object which surrounds them, communicates a definite form and impress to their internal nature. This form is not such that it can change and adapt itself to any other a man may choose to receive; and the end is foiled, while the power is destroyed, when we attempt to impose upon that which is already stamped in the soul a form which disagrees with it.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The inquiry into the proper aims and limits of State agency must be of the highest importance nay, that it is perhaps more vitally momentous than any other political question.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“How a person masters his or her fate is more important than what that fate is.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Besides the pleasure derived from acquired knowledge, there lurks in the mind of man, and tinged with a shade of sadness, an unsatisfactory longing for something beyond the present, a striving towards regions yet unknown and unopened.

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“No matter how good or great a man may be, there is yet a better and a greater man within him.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“The sorrow which calls for help and comfort is not the greatest, nor does it come from the depths of the heart.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“It is resignation and contentment that are best calculated to lead us safely through life. Whoever has not sufficient power to endure privations, and even suffering, can never feel that he is armor proof against painful emotions,
nay, he must attribute to himself, or at least to the morbid sensitiveness of his nature, every disagreeable feeling he may suffer.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt

“Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt