Friedrich Schiller: Quotes about time

Friedrich Schiller was German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. Explore interesting quotes on time.
Friedrich Schiller: 222 quotes124 likes

“Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last!
Loitering slow, the Future creepeth —
Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth —
And motionless forever stands the Past.”

Friedrich Schiller

Sentences of Confucius

“What's old collapses, times change,
And new life blossoms in the ruins.”

Friedrich Schiller William Tell

Act IV, sc. ii
Wilhelm Tell (1803)

“Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 2 Variant translation of a passage: Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)
Context: The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed, in proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.

“My son, there's nothing insignificant,
Nothing! But yet in every earthly thing
First and most principal is place and time.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act I, sc. vi
Wallenstein (1798), Part I - Die Piccolomini (The Piccolomini)

“O tender yearning, sweet hoping!
The golden time of first love!
The eye sees the open heaven,
The heart is intoxicated with bliss;
O that the beautiful time of young love
Could remain green forever.”

Friedrich Schiller

The Song of the Bell (1799)

“Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.”

Friedrich Schiller

Letter 4: Theosophy of Julius
The Philosophical Letters

“No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 9
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

“O who knows what slumbers in the background of the times?”

Friedrich Schiller Don Carlos

Act I, sc. i
Don Carlos (1787)

“Joy, in Nature's wide dominion,
Mightiest cause of all is found;
And 'tis joy that moves the pinion,
When the wheel of time goes round”

Friedrich Schiller Ode to Joy

Stanza 4
An die Freude (Ode to Joy; or Hymn to Joy) (1785)

“The empire of Saturnus is gone by;
Lord of the secret birth of things is he;
Within the lap of earth, and in the depths
Of the imagination dominates;
And his are all things that eschew the light.
The time is o'er of brooding and contrivance,
For Jupiter, the lustrous, lordeth now,
And the dark work, complete of preparation,
He draws by force into the realm of light.
Now must we hasten on to action, ere
The scheme, and most auspicious positure
Parts o'er my head, and takes once more its flight,
For the heavens journey still, and adjourn not.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act I, sc. i
Wallenstein (1798), Part II - Wallensteins Tod (The Death of Wallenstein)

“The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 35
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

“Fortune, which had never forsaken him in his lifetime, favored the King of Sweden even in his death, with the rare privilege of falling in the fullness of his glory and an untarnished fame. By a timely death, his protecting genius rescued him from the inevitable fate of man - that of forgetting moderation in the intoxication of success, and justice in the plenitude of power.”

Friedrich Schiller

History of the Thirty YEars War 178
The Thirty Years War

“He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Prologue
Wallenstein (1798), Prologue - Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein's Camp)

“Time is man's angel.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act V, sc. xi
Wallenstein (1798), Part II - Wallensteins Tod (The Death of Wallenstein)