Heinrich Heine
Heinrich Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heinewas a German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Liederby composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine's later verse and prose are distinguished by their satirical wit and irony. He is considered part of the Young Germany movement. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities. Heine spent...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth13 December 1797
CountryGermany
The cloudlets are lazily sailing O'er the blue Atlantic sea; And mid the twilight there hovers A shadowy figure o'er me...
Sweet May lies fresh before us, To life the young flowers leap, And through the Heaven's blue o'er us The rosy cloudlets sweep.
Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.
Every age thinks its battle the most important of all.
Laughter is wholesome. God is not so dull as some people make out. Did not He make the kitten to chase its tail.
The lotus flower is troubled At the sun's resplendent light; With sunken head and sadly She dreamily waits for the night.
You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.
The great pulsation of nature beats too in my breast, and when I carol aloud, I am answered by a thousand-fold echo. I hear a thousand nightingales. Spring hath sent them to awaken Earth from her morning slumber, and Earth trembles with ecstasy, her flowers are hymns, which she sings in inspiration to the sun...
Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain;— These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull...
Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea.
Oh what lies there are in kisses! And their guile so well prepared! Sweet the snaring is; but this is Sweeter still, to be ensnared.
Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle.
Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions.
Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling, and breathe forth their sweetest odours. Flow forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond these mountains the dear one of my dreams!