You'll find the quotes by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Quotes & Aphorisms and in Poems.
The greatest
of all is this, that true and real wonders
should happen so perpetually, so daily.
Without this universal miracle
a thinking man had scarcely called those such,
which only children, recha, ought to name so,
who love to gape and stare at the unusual...
Pride, rank pride!
The iron pot would with a silver prong
Be lifted from the furnace to imagine
Itself a silver vase.
For it is possible to be faithless to a national deity, but never to God, after He has once been recognised.
Why yes; a man indeed had furnished us
With more occasions to be useful to him.
God knows how readily we should have seized them.
But then he would have nothing, wanted nothing
Was in himself wrapped up, and self-sufficient,
As angels are.
The denial of an individual, had it even been a Solomon, did not arrest the progress of the general reason, and was even in itself a proof that the nation had now come a great step nearer the truth. For individuals only deny what the many are bringing into consideration; and to bring into consideration that, concerning which no one troubled himself at all before, is half way to knowledge.
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