Quote

We cannot assume the injustice of any actions which only create offense, and especially as regards religion and morals. He who utters or does anything to wound the conscience and moral sense of others, may indeed act immorally but, so long as he is not guilty of being importunate, he violates no right.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

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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
Long
Sense
Actions
Morals
Action
Indeed
Wound
Others
Conscience
Offense
Cannot
Regard
Assume
Utters
Doe
Especially
Wounds
Importunate
Anything
Create
Injustice
Violates
May
Moral
Assuming
Blasphemy
Right
Religion
Guilty
Regards

More quotes by Wilhelm von Humboldt

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However benevolent may be the intentions of Providence, they do not always advance the happiness of the individual. Providence has always higher ends in view, and works in a pre-eminent degree on the inner feelings and disposition.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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Even sleep is characteristic. How beautiful are children in their lovely innocence! how angel-like their blooming features! and how painful and anxious is the sleep of the guilty!
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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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
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It is continued temperance which sustains the body for the longest period of time, and which most surely preserves it free from sickness.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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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
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Real inward devotion knows no prayer but that arising from the depths of its own feelings.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take with us.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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Fancy brings us as many vain hopes as idle fears.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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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
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Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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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
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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
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Language makes infinite use of finite media.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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How a person masters his or her fate is more important than what that fate is.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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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
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Freedom is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity while government, or the exercise of dominion, is a single, yet real activity. The longing for freedom, therefore, is at first only too frequently suggested by the deep-felt consciousness of its absence.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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The more a man acts on his own, the more he develops himself. In large associations he is too prone to become merely an instrument.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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Man is more disposed to domination than freedom and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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When we ... devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, ihen happiness comes of itself.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.
Wilhelm von Humboldt