"Lessing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Protestant writers. This author holds a high rank in the Catholic literature of Germany, and has been chosen Bishop of Mayence. Professor Hillebrand is occupied with a revision of his highly esteemed History of German national literature since Lessing. There seems to be no reason to fear that Giessen is doing less than its share toward keeping the ocean of German books up at ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... life occurred in 1754, when he made the acquaintance of Lessing. The two young men became constant friends. Lessing, before he knew Mendelssohn, had written a drama, "The Jews," in which, perhaps for the first time, a Jew was represented on the stage as a man of honor. In Mendelssohn, Lessing recognized a new Spinoza; in Lessing, Mendelssohn ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... the pretty widow's here, too—my wife's sister, Ellen Lessing. We've a great plan for tomorrow, Red. I can't venture to drive this elephant of a car yet, but the women are wild for a trip in her. She holds seven. Martha wants you to drive us and the Chesters to-morrow ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... there were among the Maimunists, or rationalists, Levi ben Abraham, an extraordinarily liberal man; Shemtob Palquera, one of the most learned Jews of his century, and Yedaya Penini, a philosopher and pessimistic poet, whose "Contemplation of the World" was translated by Mendelssohn, and praised by Lessing and Goethe. Despite this array of talent, the opponents were stronger, the most representative partisan being the Talmudist ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... Weltanschauung, or the relation of his work to its environment. Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method—that endeavor to put the reader at the poet's point of view—by which modern critics, from Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at "Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics by recognized makers, like the authors of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... one vividly of Heine's image of his country in the dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand at it, with a sobering effect upon readers. The intention to produce the reverse effect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poor old Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and his left, consists ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was at work. Finally the rolling of carriages toward the 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 time ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the high degree of culture which, during the last fifty years, had become general among the middle classes of Germany, and Goethe ascribed the merit of this not so much to Lessing as to Herder and Wieland. "Lessing," said he, "was of the very highest understanding, and only one equally great could truly learn of him. To a half faculty he was dangerous." He mentioned a journalist who had formed himself on Lessing, and at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of the world: remember that it is by truth alone that the Arts can ever hold the position for which they were intended, as the most powerful instruments, the most gentle guides; that, of all classes, there is none to whom the celebrated words of Lessing, "That the destinies of a nation depend upon its young men between nineteen and twenty-five years of age," can apply so well as to yourselves. Recollect, that your portion in this is most important: that your share is with the poet's share; that, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... of dogma as a historical and critical discipline had its origin in the last century through the works of Mosheim, C. W. F. Walch, Ernesti, Lessing and Semler. Lange gave to the world in 1796 the first attempt at a history of dogma as a special branch of theological study. The theologians of the Early and Mediaeval Churches have only transmitted histories of Heretics ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the Sculptures in the Museum as well as a member of the Academy. His most successful original works were portrait busts, and he had many notable people among his sitters. Among them were the Emperor of Germany, the King of Bavaria, Schelling, Goethe, Lessing, and many others. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... At the Lessing Theatre a few days later, "Peer Gynt," that poetical drama of the Teuton's destiny—much better done because really nearer to the German soul than Shakespeare. Solveig had faith; though it was not ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... sublime, contest of human passions"—perhaps the most poetic conception ever awakened by the somewhat familiar view of an elderly gentleman asleep under the influence of a sermon on a drowsy mid-summer day. Writing to his father from Fort Boykin, he asks him to "seize at any price volumes of Uhland, Lessing, ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... finest productions of modern art." These were not men to be wholly despised. Furthermore it is to be remembered, as before indicated, that the Germans, in a generation only just passed away, had here in Rome formed a learned school based on the antique; Lessing, in his treatise, the 'Laocoon,' and Winckelmann, by his criticisms on the marbles of the Vatican, had induced a new Classic Renaissance. The painter Raphael Mengs, thus guided, appropriately executed in the Villa Albani the ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... Professor Osborn points out,[5] "it is a very striking fact, that the basis of our modern methods of studying the Evolution problem was established not by the early naturalists nor by the speculative writers, but by the Philosophers." He refers to Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Herder, and Schelling. "They alone were upon the main track of modern thought. It is evident that they were groping in the dark for a working theory of the Evolution of life, and it is remarkable that they ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... 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 ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... connection with this point, two admirable essays by Lessing,—the one entitled Leibnitz on Eternal Punishment, the other Objections of Andreas Wissowatius to the Doctrine of the Trinity. Of the latter the real topic is Leibnitz's Defensio Trinitatis. The sharp-sighted Lessing, than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... a most glorious picture here. The Trial of John Huss before the Council of Constance, by Lessing—one of the few things I have seen in painting which have had power deeply to affect me. I have it not in my heart to criticize it as a mere piece of coloring and finish, though in these respects I thought it ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... l'homme est proche ... Antigone va passer du menage de la famille au menage de la planete (prophetic words). But when lovely woman begins to talk of the propagation of the ideal she only means the human species. With Lessing he believes: "There is, at most, but one disagreeable woman in the world; a pity then that every man ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... neighbours, in short, after their characteristic fashion, were pushing logic to its consequences, and fully awake to the approach of an impending catastrophe. In Germany the movement took the philosophical and literary shape. Lessing's critical writings had heralded the change. Goethe, after giving utterance to passing phases of thought, was rising to become the embodiment of a new ideal of intellectual culture. Schiller passed through the storm and stress period and developed into ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... had been concerned chiefly to prove that the Reformation changed nothing save abuses, so now the leader's liberalism was much over-stressed. It was in view of the earlier Protestant bigotry that Lessing [Sidenote: Lessing] apostrophized the Wittenberg professor: "Luther! thou great, misunderstood man! Thou hast freed us from the yoke of tradition, who is to free us from the more unbearable yoke of the letter? Who will finally bring ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... which their note-books lay open. They used these as those who had been trained to take notes and recite from them. I had been told that the teacher in charge of this class was one of the most excellent in the city. The hour was occupied by a lecture on Lessing, a poet whom the class were ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... Lessing, Schiller, Herder, and Goethe; after re-reading the two last for the twentieth time, this is what ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... eighteenth century, when two poor translations of Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet appeared, and J. C. Gottsched severely criticized Shakespeare's art. In 1759, in a journal, "Litteraturbriefe," Lessing began a warm defense of Shakespeare and declared his superiority to Racine and Corneille. His Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767) went far in directing the change of taste from French classicism and in establishing Shakespeare in German thought ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... by James Sime, is not a great biography, but it is an interesting and most profitable study of a noble man. Lessing will be an inspiration greater almost than any other of the moderns for those who are brought in contact with his fine personality. The book is in 2 volumes, published by ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... a mode of 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
... interesting. He selected my course of reading, and a very strong bill of fare I was finding it, some of the passages straining my utmost power of brain to comprehend. He had, as yet, confined me chiefly to German literature, mainly Kant and Lessing, with a dip into Schiller now and then, he said, by way of relaxation. He seemed gratified at the interest I took in his efforts to develop my intellectual powers, and sometimes he sat chatting with me, after the lesson was ended, by the firelight, until we were ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... in this department, is the opening to the public, at the Duesseldorf Gallery, of LESSING'S Great Picture, The Martyrdom of Huss. The Duesseldorf Gallery had contained some of the finest modern paintings in the country, and had done much to keep alive the aroused interest of the public in the Arts of Design before the arrival of this, the greatest work of the acknowledged ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... and aesthetics, in the sense in which these terms are used and understood by German philosophical writers, such as Schiller, embrace a wider field than the fine arts. Lessing, in his "Laocoon," had already shown the point of contrast between painting and poetry; and aesthetics, being defined as the science of the beautiful, must of necessity embrace poetry. Accordingly Schiller's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... unless it meets with something to reflect it; and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad. But fame is not a certain symptom of merit; because you can have the one without the other; or, as Lessing nicely puts it, Some people obtain fame, and others ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... perhaps, receive much pleasure from this stout, plain, prosaic lady (like one of Rubens's women grown old, as Lamartine later described her) whom he left to her letter-writing, her reading of Kant, of La Harpe, of Shakespeare, of Lessing; to her painting lessons, and long discussions on art with Monsieur Fabre. The woman whose presence, no longer exciting, was doubtless a matter of indifference to him. But, nevertheless, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never wrote more completely from his ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... morn 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 poetry? why she, than ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold |
