Wilhelm Humboldt Quotes

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.

How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.

All growth toward perfection is but a returning to original existence.

Results are nothing; the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything.

As soon as one stops searching for knowledge, or if one imagines that it need not be creatively sought in the depths of the human spirit but can be assembled extensively by collecting and classifying facts, everything is irrevocably and forever lost.

If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.

Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness...we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.

…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness… …we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.

Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation.

As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.

If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the bible had known as much about the sciences as is now known by every intelligent man, the book never could have been written. It was produced by ignorance, and has been believed and defended by its author. It has lost power in the proportion that man has gained knowledge. A few years ago, this book was appealed to in the settlement of all scientific questions; but now, even the clergy confess that in such matters, it has ceased to speak with the voice of authority. For the establishment of facts, the word of man is now considered far better than the word of God. In the world of science, Jehovah was superseded by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. All that God told Moses, admitting the entire account to be true, is dust and ashes compared to the discoveries of Descartes, Laplace, and Humboldt. In matters of fact, the bible has ceased to be regarded as a standard. Science has succeeded in breaking the chains of theology. A few years ago, Science endeavored to show that it was not inconsistent with the bible. The tables have been turned, and now, Religion is endeavoring to prove that the bible is not inconsistent with Science. The standard has been changed.

What does it mean to be truly educated? I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls. To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others. That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.

Human nature must be something which always remains one and the same, but which may be carried out in manifold ways.

Faith can be interested in results only, for a truth once recognized as such puts an end to the believer's thinking.

It is an absolutely vain endeavor to attempt to reconstruct or even comprehend the nature of a human being by simply knowing the forces which have acted upon him. However deeply we should like to penetrate, however close we seem to be drawing to truth, one unknown quantity eludes us: man's primordial energy, his original self, that personality which was given him with the gift of life itself. On it rests man's true freedom; it alone determines his real character.

The price of apparent happiness and enjoyment is the neglect of the spontaneous active energies of the acting members.

If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.

Language is deeply entwined in the intellectual development of humanity itself, it accompanies the latter upon every step of its localized progression or regression; moreover, the pertinent cultural level in each case is recognizable in it. ... Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples. Their language is their soul, and their soul is their language. It is impossible to conceive them ever sufficiently identical... . The creation of language is an innate necessity of humanity. It is not a mere external vehicle, designed to sustain social intercourse, but an indispensable factor for the development of human intellectual powers, culminating in the formulation of philosophical doctrine.

School is different. Pupils are usually not encouraged to follow their own learning paths, question and discuss everything the teacher is teaching and move on to another topic if something does not promise to generate interesting insight. The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.

We aren’t born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. If we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens, and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am. Humanism thus sees life as a gradual process of inner change, leading from ignorance to enlightenment by means of experiences. The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a large variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences. In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human’. This could well be the humanist motto.

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

The best and noblest parts of man depend precious little on culture, education, and whatever else it is called. One can never have enough respect for true humanity as it is visible in the persons of the totally uneducated classes, and never enough humility if one sometimes believes one is superior to them.

In the early nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human’.

To judge a man means nothing other than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?

All situations in which the interrelationships between extremes are involved are the most interesting and instructive.

Gelehrte dirigieren ist nicht viel besser als eine Komödiantengruppe unter sich zu haben.

We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness.

Basically, it is always the connections with people that give life its value.

Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.

In the early nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’.

Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness

In the early nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human’.4 This could well be the humanist motto.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language “makes infinite use of finite media.” We know the difference between the forgettable Dog bites man and the newsworthy Man bites dog because of the order in which dog, man, and bites are combined. That is, we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar; as I have mentioned, it should not be confused with the pedagogical and stylistic grammars we encountered in school.

The sum of the knowable, that soil which the human spirit must till, lies between all the languages and independent of them, at their center. But man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his own modes of cognition and feeling, in other words: subjectively. Just where study and research touch the highest and deepest point, just there does the mechanical, logical use of reason - whatever in us can most easily be separated from our uniqueness as individual human beings - find itself at the end of its rope. From here on we need a process of inner perception and creation. And all that we can plainly know about this is its result, namely, that objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality.

What does it mean to be truly educated? I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls. To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others. That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.” ― Noam Chomsky

Ich finde... dass sich ein Buch gerade vorzugsweise zu einem freundschaftlichen Geschenk eignet, man liest es oft, man kehrt oft dazu zurück, man naht sich ihm aber nur in ausgewählten Momenten, braucht es nicht wie eine Tasse, ein Glas, einen Hausrat in jedem gleichgültigen Augenblick des Lebens und erinnert sich so immer des Freundes im Augenblick eines würdigen Genusses.

Modul în care un om îşi acceptă destinul este mai important decît însuşi destinul său.

Today we know that there are multiple reasons for the changing water levels. One factor is the amount of water coming in from the Volga which is tied to the rainfall of a huge catchment region – all of which in turn relates to the atmospheric conditions of the North Atlantic. Many scientists now believe that these fluctuations reflect climatic changes in the northern hemisphere, making the Caspian Sea an important field of study for climate change investigations. Other theories claim that the water levels are affected by tectonic forces. These are exactly the kinds of global connections that interested Humboldt. To see the Caspian Sea, Humboldt wrote to Wilhelm, was one of the ‘highlights of my life

Caroline was half amused and half concerned about her frenzied new brother-in-law. She enjoyed his energy but also sometimes made fun of him – as a sister might tease a younger brother. Alexander had his quirks and those should be respected, she told Wilhelm, but she was also worried about his state of mind and loneliness.

Vous savez, Madame, que j’ajoute un grand prix à l’étude des nuances qu’il y a entre le caractère des diférentes nations, et je crois pouvoir démontrer un jour qu’à moins de n’en venirjusque là, jusqu’à développer le caractère de chaque nation, je dirais même de chaque peuplade d’après ses nuances individuelles, on travaillera toujours en vain tant en morale, qu’en politique. On s’occupe beaucoup trop peu de l’homme et beaucoup trop des ouvrages qu’il fait et des institutions qui doivent le diriger, et on néglige surtout de l’étudier dans l’ensemble de son individu. C’est là surtout ce qui rend, ce me semble, la philosophie en France si vague et la poésie pour la plupart aussi froide et peu intéressante. Tout ce qui ne consiste qu’en généralités, tou- jours abstraites, ne saurait all au cœur ni être appliqué avec fruit à la vie sociale. C’est encore là pourquoi le système de la perfectibilité trouve plus d’adversaires en France qu’en nul autre pays. Car ce système, comme vous l’avez si bien démontré, ne se fonde que sur ce que le développe- ment des facultés de l’homme ne connait aucunes bornes que l’homme lui-même pût leur as- signer. On ne peut le combattre qu’en s’attachant aux choses, aux ouvrages qu’il produit. On part de l’idée déterminée et circonscrite qu’on s’est formé de ces ouvrages et il est aisé de dire pour lors qu’il serait impossible d’aller plus loin. Il est si facile de voir les résultats heureux que produit la diférence entre le génie et le caractère des individus comme des nations; on n’a qu’à comparer la littérature français et allemande pour s’en convaincre. Néanmoins on voudrait se priver de ces mêmes avantages et au lieu de cultiver, de développer et de purifier la société des caractères, on voudrait l’annuler, et n’établir partout qu’une même manière de voir, de penser et de s’énoncer. On ne voit donc qu’il doit nécessairement chercher de nouveaux idiomes puisqu’il entrevoit toujours des idées que ceux qu’il connait, n’expriment qu’imparfaitement.

I can demonstrate very easily that the term “genetic,” which today is the exclusive term for biological evolution, was actually coined in Germany in the eighteenth century by a man like Herder, Wieland, and Schiller, and was used in the quite modern term by Wilhelm von Humboldt long time before Darwin. The Humboldt passages are so interesting that I will even quote some. Humboldt spoke in 1836 about the fact that the definition of language can only be a genetic one, “nur eine genetische seyn,” and goes on to argue that the formation of language successively through many stages, like the origin of natural phenomena, is clearly a phenomena of evolution. All that was ready in the theory of languages thirty years before Darwin applied it to the natural sciences. Yet it had been forgotten, or at least ignored, outside the two classical instances of language, law, and I may now add economics including the market and money. And when it was reintroduced by the social Darwinists, all the parts of the explanation of the mechanism were also taken over

Each issue bore the same perfectly chosen liberal epigraph—awkwardly written, as we’ve learned that liberal epigraphs are—from Wilhelm von Humboldt, the same German thinker who had given Mill the idea of self-development: “The one idea which History exhibits as evermore developing itself into greater distinctness is the Idea of Humanity—the noble endeavor to throw down all the barriers erected between men by prejudice and one-sided views, and by setting aside the distinctions of Religion, Country and Color, to treat the whole Human race as one brotherhood.

France. To Wilhelm’s mind, Alexander ‘had stopped being German’. Most of his books were even written and published first in French.

Like his brother Wilhelm, who had almost single-handedly established a new Prussian education system two decades previously, Alexander believed that education was the foundation of a free and happy society.

Like his brother Wilhelm, who had almost single-handedly established a new Prussian education system two decades previously, Alexander believed that education was the foundation of a free and happy society. For many this was a dangerous thought. In Britain, for example, pamphlets were published, warning that knowledge exalted the poor ‘above their humble and laborious duties’.