It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.

Our age believed herself pregnant with auspicious progeny, but when her hour came, it turned out to be dropsy.

The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.

A wise man can and should stand above his times, not so the poet, but he should be their apex.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

German diligence is actually endurance.

I cannot be exacting because I respect myself.