"Marriage is the beginning and pinnacle of..." - Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.”

“What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?”

“Traveling is like gambling: it is always connected with winning and losing and generally where it is least expected we receive, more or less than what we hoped for.”

“Politics is not really different from marriage. You cannot get things done in your relationship if you tell your wife: Look, if you haven't made the bed and if you don't get the food on the table, I will go and just hire someone and you will become irrelevant. That is not how you make a marriage work.”

“This book was written in those long hours I spent waiting for my wife to get dressed to go out. And if she had never gotten dressed at all this book would never have been written.”

“When we got married, we knew our honeymoon was going to be public, anyway, so we decided to use it to make a statement. We sat in bed and talked to reporters for seven days. It was hilarious. In effect, we were doing a commercial for peace on the front page of the papers instead of a commercial for war.”

“Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization-one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?”

“As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.”

“To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.”