277 Quotes by Johann Kaspar Lavater

No communication or gift can exhaust genius or impoverish charity.

She whom smiles and tears make equally lovely may command all hearts.

Avoid connecting yourself with characters whose good and bad sides are unmixed and have not fermented together; they resemble vials of vinegar and oil; or palletts set with colors; they are either excellent at home and insufferable abroad, or intolerable within doors and excellent in public; they are unfit for friendship, merely because their stamina, their ingredients of character are too single, too much apart; let them be finely ground up with each other, and they are incomparable.

His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing.

Certain trifling flaws sit as disgracefully on a character of elegance as a ragged button on a court dress.

Before thou callest a man hero or genius, investigate whether his exertion has features of indelibility; for all that is celestial, all genius, is the offspring of immortality.

Joy and grief decide character. What exalts prosperity? what imbitters grief? what leaves us indifferent? what interests us? As the interest of man, so his God,--as his God, so he.

Whatever obscurities may involve religious tenets, humility and love constitute the essence of true religion; the humble is formed to adore, the loving to associate with eternal love.

Who despises all that is despicable is made to be impressed with all that is grand.