Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller was a German playwright, poet, philosopher, historian, and physician who worked across multiple literary and intellectual disciplines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Born on 10 November 1759 in Marbach am Neckar, Schiller was educated at the Karlsschule Stuttgart and later at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He worked in the German language throughout his career and held citizenship in both the Duchy of Württemberg and Saxe-Weimar. His activities extended beyond the stage and the page, encompassing work as a novelist, librettist, and translator. He died on 9 May 1805 in Weimar.
Among his notable works as a playwright are The Robbers, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, and William Tell. These works were produced across the span of his career and reflect his engagement with both the Sturm und Drang movement and Weimar Classicism. His output across drama, poetry, philosophy, and history places him as a writer associated with two significant movements in the German literary tradition of the period.
Quotes by Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller's insights on:
Youth's gay springtime scarcely knowing / Went I forth the world to roam-- / And the dance of youth, the glowing, / Left I in my father's home,
Was it always as now? This race I truly can't fathom. / Nothing is young but old age; youth, alas! only is old.
As an eagle whose plumes to the sun are unfurled, / Swept his hope round the heaven on its limitless wings.
Take the world! Zeus exclaimed from his throne in the skies to the children of man--"take the world I now give; it shall ever remain as your heirloom and prize, so divide it as brothers, and happily live.
Father Zeus, who reign'st o'er all that in ether's mansions dwell, let a sign from thee now fall that thou lov'st this offering well!
Shyly in the mountain-cleft / Was the Troglodyte concealed; / And the roving Nomad left, / Desert lying, each broad field.
