"Lessing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... supplies of tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdroeckh himself, admirer though he was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite beverage—the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of Lessing—produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk of his tendencies earthwards taking a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Kensington Gardens The Strayed Reveller Morality Dover Beach Philomela Human Life Isolation—To Marguerite Kaiser Dead The Last Word Palladium Revolutions Self-Dependence A Summer Night Geist's Grave Epilogue—To Lessing's Laocooen ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Second edition, Halle, 1807, II, pp. 309ff. The definition of humor and the perplexing question as to how far it is identical with "Laune," have received considerable attention at the hands of aesthetic critics; compare, for example, Lessing in the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... beautiful little book in MS. I don't wish thee to take my opinion, but the first leisure hour thee have, read it, and I am sure thee will decide that it is exactly the thing for publication.... The little prose poems are unlike anything in our literature, and remind me of the German writer Lessing. They are equally adapted to young and old.... The author, Lucy Larcom, of Beverly, is a novice in writing and book-making, and with no ambition to appear in print; and were I not perfectly certain that her little collection is worthy ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... desert. And there was one art only of which he knew nothing—that of changing stones into bread, for he consumed the greatest part of his life in poverty and under hard pressure—a curse which clings to nearly all great German geniuses, and will last, it may be, till ended by political freedom. Lessing was more inspired by political feelings than men supposed, a peculiarity which we do not find among his contemporaries, and we can now see for the first time what he meant in sketching the duo-despotism ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... remains to notice the very important influence exercised upon English thought by Coleridge, not only by the force of his own somewhat mystic temperament, but by his familiarity with such writers as Kant, Lessing, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, who had studied far more profoundly than any English philosophers or theologians, the relation of man's higher understanding to matters not cognisable by the ordinary powers ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... "In Lessing's great picture, the good, kind-faced woman whose simplicity Huss blesses as she eagerly heaps up the fagots for his martyrdom, is but the type of vast multitudes of ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... it must be admitted that something more than mere erudition is required to conjure away the perils which the humanities now have to face. It is necessary to quicken the interest of the rising generation, to show them that it is not only historically true to say, with Lessing, that "with Greece the morning broke," but that it is equally true to maintain that in what may, relatively speaking, be called the midday splendour of learning, we cannot dispense with the guiding light of the early morn; that Greek literature, in Professor ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... as through Hyde Park we walk'd, My friend and I, by chance we talk'd Of Lessing's famed Laocooen; And after we awhile had gone In Lessing's track, and tried to see What painting is, what poetry— Diverging to another thought, "Ah," cries my friend, "but who hath taught Why music and the other arts Oftener perform aright their parts Than ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Park's "German Selections," Pliny, Heeren's Ancient Greece, two volumes of the Biblical Repository, and two of his own magazines; Mr. Judd has sent me two volumes of Carlyle, and Mr. Ripley four of Lessing—all of these must be despatched a la hate. July 5th.—Last evening we spent upon the Common witnessing a beautiful exhibition of fireworks. This morning I have been to Union wharf to see the departure of some missionaries. For a few minutes, time seemed a speck and eternity near—but how transient ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the "artistic temperament." Oh, mon ami, that "artistic temperament." "Is this all? Up again!" If you are discouraged I can only suggest a course of reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few offhand—Lessing, Moliere, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, these will suffice. When did they stop and fold their hands in despair? As for the Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention, their exuberance under difficulties ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Caesar's "Gallic War." In German I read, partly with my fingers and partly with Miss Sullivan's assistance, Schiller's "Lied von der Glocke" and "Taucher," Heine's "Harzreise," Freytag's "Aus dem Staat Friedrichs des Grossen," Riehl's "Fluch Der Schonheit," Lessing's "Minna von Barnhelm," and Goethe's "Aus meinem Leben." I took the greatest delight in these German books, especially Schiller's wonderful lyrics, the history of Frederick the Great's magnificent achievements and the account of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... describing expressive signs of emotion being particularly appreciated. Dickens, Walter Scott, Mrs. Oliphant, and Mrs. Gaskell are among the novelists quoted; while the author of Job, Homer, Virgil, Seneca, Shakespeare, Lessing, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many other deceased writers, illustrate the subject. The living authorities—scientific men, travellers, doctors—referred to for facts are exceedingly numerous, including Sir James ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... well-selected library. All the books are beautifully though not showily bound, and they bear marks of assiduous reading. Among the "unbelieving books" are the works of Fenelon, Bossuet, and Pascal, peacefully assorted with those of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, whilst Lavater, Gellert, Lessing, and Klopstock find a place by the side of Goethe and Schiller, and the plays ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... a game at skittles. In this walk they were accompanied by F. W. Schadow, the director of the Academy of Art and founder of the Dusseldorf School, and some of his pupils, among whom may have been one or more of its brightest stars—Lessing, Bendemann, Hildebrandt, Sohn, and Alfred Rethel. Hiller, who furnishes us with some particulars of what Mendelssohn calls "a very agreeable day passed in playing and discussing music," says that Schadow and his pupils ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... consideration he thanked God he was forever inaccessible, and if in life's vicissitudes he should become destitute through their lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. "Wer nur selbst was hatte," says Lessing's Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, "mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!" This ideal of the well-born man without possessions was embodied in knight-errantry and templardom; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... he took off his hat to a regiment—he has often been imitated since—all this was reported on the Neckar and the Rhine, was printed, and listened to with merry laughter and tears of emotion. It was natural that poets should sing his praise. Three of them had been in the Prussian army: Gleim and Lessing, as secretaries of Prussian generals, and Ewald von Kleist, a favorite of the younger literary circles, as an officer, until the bullet struck him at Kunersdorf. But still more touching for us is the loyal devotion of the Prussian people. The old ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... picture.—A letter from Duesseldorf under date of 9th July, in the Courier and Enquirer, says that Lessing's great painting, "The Martyrdom of Huss," Sad just been finished and had been exhibited for the last few days at the Academy of Fine Arts, where it was visited by thousands. When it became known that orders for its immediate shipment ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... French Salon in the third decade of the century produced a remarkable effect, and emphasized the interest in landscape painting already growing in France, and later so splendidly developed by Rousseau, Corot, Millet, and their celebrated contemporaries. In Germany the Achenbachs, Lessing, and many other artists were active in this movement, while in America, Innes, A. H. Wyant, and Homer Martin, with numerous followers, were raising landscape art to an ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... expression frequently made use of. Even Lessing has sanctioned it, when in his Laocoon, he speaks of "the highest expression leaving ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Pale Goethe, Marlowe, Lessing—calm your fears! None plots to steal your laurel wreaths away. Approach; take tickets: you shall witness here The ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... imperial theatre was heard, and presently the shouts of the applauding audience. The empress heard nothing. She had never attended the theatre since her husband's death, and it was nothing to her that to-night Lessing's beautiful drama, "Emilia Galotti," was being represented for the first ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... His favourite authors were Lessing, Schiller, Herder, and Goethe; after re-reading the two last for the twentieth time, this is ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... openly engaged, these two, but there was an understanding between them, and an understanding that her family was slowly recognising. Mr. Lessing, at first, would never have accepted an engagement, for he had other ideas for his daughter of the big house in Park Lane. The rich city merchant, church-warden at St. John's, important in his party, and a person of distinction when at his club, would have been seriously ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... with Schiller: he read Rousseau more or less, the early works of Goethe, Lessing's Emilia Galotti, and plays by Klinger, Leisewitz, Lenz and Wagner—all more or less revolutionary in spirit. He also made the acquaintance of Shakespeare and steeped himself in the spirit of antique heroism as he found ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... Teufel bey'm Haare packen, so hat Er Dich bey'm Kopfe, says Lessing, and so it may become here with this first success of the pretorians, or even worse than pretorians; these here are Yanitschars of ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Theory, History, and Practice of Criticism, with special attention to Aristotle, Boileau, Lessing, and English and later French writers, and a study of the great works of imagination. Professor ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... which the military ardor of this period stimulated, the best are those by Gleim, (1719-1803) called "Songs of a Prussian Grenadier." All the literary men, Lessing not excepted, were seized with the Prussian enthusiasm; the pen ravaged the domain of sentiment to collect trophies for Father Friedrich. The desolation it produced in the attempt to write the word Glory could be matched ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... treated in literature," said Raphael. "We are made either angels or devils. On the one hand, Lessing and George Eliot, on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... companies; while his very multiscience, and his fertility of thought and imagination, kept him in a whirl which hindered his "settling" to anything. Although in one sense he had the finest and wisest critical taste of any man then living—I do not bar even Gray or even Lessing—his taste in some other ways was utterly untrustworthy and sometimes horribly bad; while even his strictly critical faculty seems never to have been exercised on his own books—a failure forming part of the "ostrich-like indifference" with which he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... him. Would not further culture rid him of the incubus? His dream of Berlin revived. True, bigotry barked there too, but culture went on its serene course. The fame and influence of Mendelssohn had grown steadily, and it was now at its apogee, for Lessing had written Nathan Der Weise, and in the tempest that followed its production, and despite the ban placed on the play and its author in both Catholic and Protestant countries, the most fanatical Christian foes ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... mental and moral charms of the women, or the adoration, sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characters says: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is inconceivable to me, would be my death"—we still hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are looked ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck |
