Wilhelm Von Humboldt Quotes
Enjoy the top 89 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by 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 —
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
“How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
Results are nothing; the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything.
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
All growth toward perfection is but a returning to original existence.
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— 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
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
“We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— 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
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— 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
“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
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
“Life, in all ranks and situations, is an outward occupation, an actual and active work.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— 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
“Real inward devotion knows no prayer but that arising from the depths of its own feelings.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
— 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
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
“Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.”
— Wilhelm Von Humboldt
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