Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves itto the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.

It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.

I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.