“Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.”
History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Vol. III (1834)
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Heinrich Heine 61
German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic 1797–1856Related quotes

The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)
Context: All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit.

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“He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.”
Greatness
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Context: What is the use of working toward a lawful civic constitution among individuals, i. e., toward the creation of a commonwealth? The same unsociability which drives man to this causes any single commonwealth to stand in unrestricted freedom in relation to others; consequently, each of them must expect from another precisely the evil which oppressed the individuals and forced them to enter into a lawful civic state. The friction among men, the inevitable antagonism, which is a mark of even the largest societies and political bodies, is used by Nature as a means to establish a condition of quiet and security. Through war, through the taxing and never-ending accumulation of armament, through the want which any state, even in peacetime, must suffer internally, Nature forces them to make at first inadequate and tentative attempts; finally, after devastations, revolutions, and even complete exhaustion, she brings them to that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience, to wit, to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations. In a league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations … from a united power acting according to decisions reached under the laws of their united will.

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 347.
Don Alvarez in Act I, Sc. 1; also misquoted as "Reason gains all people by compelling none."
Alzira: A Tragedy (1736)