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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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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
Question
Inquiry
State
Agency
Proper
Political
Aim
States
Importance
Must
Limits
Vitally
Highest
Momentous
Perhaps
Aims

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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.
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If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in.
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All situations in which the interrelationships between extremes are involved are the most interesting and instructive.
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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.
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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.
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When we ... devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, ihen happiness comes of itself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No matter how good or great a man may be, there is yet a better and a greater man within him.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
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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.
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The State is not in itself an end, but is only a means towards human development.
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Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take with us.
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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.
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All translating seems to me to be simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task.
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Fancy brings us as many vain hopes as idle fears.
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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.
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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