10 Friedrich von Schiller Quotes on Freedom

Friedrich von Schiller quotes on freedom

12. Man is created free, and is free, Though he be born in chains.

23. On the mountains there is freedom! The world is perfect everywhere, Save where man comes with his torment.

45. 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.

46. It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

47. When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love.

53. Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

67. The hat is the pride of man; for he who cannot keep his hat on before kings and emperors is no free man.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

103. Freedom can occur only through education.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

106. Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

123. No emperor has the power to dictate to the heart.

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.