25 Quotes by E. T. A. Hoffmann

I may be permitted, kind reader, to doubt whether you have ever been enclosed in a glass bottle, unless some vivid dream has teased you with such magical mishaps.

It is only in the morning that one should marry, read unfavourable reviews, make one's will, beat one's servants, and so forth.

Human beings ought not to draw in their antennae at every ungentle touch, like supersensitive insects.

Every year lays more earth upon us, which weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go under the earth at last.

Everything here below beneath the sun is subject to continual change; and perhaps there is nothing which can be called more inconstant than opinion, which turns round in an everlasting circle like the wheel of fortune. He who reaps praise today is overwhelmed with biting censure tomorrow; today we trample under foot the man who tomorrow will be raised far above us.

It is true that writers often owe their most inspired thoughts, their most extraordinary phrases, to their generous typesetters, who assist their flights of fancy with so-called typographical errors.

Mozart's music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life.

The foot of the heavenly ladder, which we have got to mount in order to reach the higher regions, has to be fixed firmly in every-day life, so that everybody may be able to climb up it along with us. When people then find that they have got climbed up higher and higher into a marvelous, magical world, they will feel that that realm, too, belongs to their ordinary, every-day life, and is, merely, the wonderful and most glorious part thereof.

There is nothing more marvelous or madder than real life.