Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Age: 67 †
Born: 1767
Born: June 22
Died: 1835
Died: April 8
Anthropologist
Diplomat
Historian
Linguist
Philosopher
Politician
Teacher
Writer
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt
Unnecessary
Makes
Government
Best
More quotes by Wilhelm von Humboldt
The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a finished man.
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
Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.
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
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
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
If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
The state should avoid all solicitude for the positive welfare of its citizens, and not proceed a step further than is necessary for their mutual security and their protection against foreign enemies. It should impose restrictions on freedom for no other purpose.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Fancy brings us as many vain hopes as idle fears.
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
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
Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation.
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
Language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Results are nothing the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
All translating seems to me to be simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
