Top 60 Wilhelm von Humboldt Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

2. “Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation’s culture as its language.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

3. “Language makes infinite use of finite media.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

4. “Language is the spiritual exhalation of the nation.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

5. “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 still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

6. “All translating seems to me to be simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

7. “To inquire and to create; these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

8. “Every man, however good he may be, has a yet better man dwelling in him, which is properly himself, but to whom nevertheless he is often unfaithful. It is to this interior and less mutable being that we should attach ourselves, not to be changeable, every-day man.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

9. “How a person masters his or her fate is more important than what that fate is.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

10. “Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take with us.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

11. “Fancy brings us as many vain hopes as idle fears.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

12. “Natural objects themselves, even when they make no claim to beauty, excite the feelings, and occupy the imagination. Nature pleases, attracts, delights, merely because it is nature. We recognize in it an Infinite Power.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

13. “In the moral world there is nothing impossible if we can bring a thorough will to it. Man can do everything with himself, but he must not attempt to do too much with others.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

14. “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.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

15. “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.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

16. “A man must seek his happiness and inward peace from objects which cannot be taken away from him.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

17. “Freedom is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity; while government, or the exercise of dominion, is a single, yet real activity. The longing for freedom, therefore, is at first only too frequently suggested by the deep-felt consciousness of its absence.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

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

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

19. “If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

20. “It is almost more important how a person takes his fate than what it is. And the best way is with gratitude while trying to improve it for the good of others and themselves.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

21. “If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

22. “Women are in this respect more fortunate than men, that most of their employments are of such a nature that they can at the same time be thinking of quite different things.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

23. “However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

24. “Man is more disposed to domination than freedom; and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

25. “True resignation, which always brings with it the confidence that unchangeable goodness will make even the disappointment of our hopes, and the contradictions of life, conducive to some benefit, casts a grave but tranquil light over the prospect of even a toilsome and troubled life.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

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

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

27. “It is usually more important how a man meets his fate than what it is.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

28. “However benevolent may be the intentions of Providence, they do not always advance the happiness of the individual. Providence has always higher ends in view, and works in a pre-eminent degree on the inner feelings and disposition.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

29. “No matter how good or great a man may be, there is yet a better and a greater man within him.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

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

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

31. “When we are not too anxious about happiness and unhappiness, but devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, then happiness comes of itself – nay, even springs from the midst of a life of troubles and anxieties and privations.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

32. “The sea has been called deceitful and treacherous, but there lies in this trait only the character of a great natural power, which, to speak according to our own feelings, renews its strength, and, without reference to joy or sorrow, follows eternal laws which are imposed by a higher Power.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

33. “To judge a man means nothing more 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?”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

34. “The State is not in itself an end, but is only a means towards human development.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

35. “Even sleep is characteristic. How beautiful are children in their lovely innocence! how angel-like their blooming features! and how painful and anxious is the sleep of the guilty!”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

36. “Work is as much a necessity to man as eating and sleeping. Even those who do nothing that can be called work still imagine they are doing something. The world has not a man who is an idler in his own eyes.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

37. “The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

38. “War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

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

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

40. “Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

41. “Government, religion, property, books, are nothing but the scaffolding to build men. Earth holds up to her master no fruit like the finished man.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

42. “Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a part of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

43. “The sorrow which calls for help and comfort is not the greatest, nor does it come from the depths of the heart.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

44. “The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a finished man.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

45. “It is a characteristic of old age to find the progress of time accelerated. The less one accomplishes in a given time, the shorter does the retrospect appear.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

46. “Besides the pleasure derived from acquired knowledge, there lurks in the mind of man, and tinged with a shade of sadness, an unsatisfactory longing for something beyond the present, a striving towards regions yet unknown and unopened.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

47. “The very variety arising from the union of numbers of individuals is the highest good which social life can confer, and this variety is undoubtedly lost in proportion to the degree of State interference.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

48. “If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

49. “If it were possible to make an accurate calculation of the evils which police regulations occasion, and of those which they prevent, the number of the former would, in all cases, exceed that of the latter.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

50. “Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.”

— Wilhelm von Humboldt