In Germany, a certain artistic sense is fairly common, but the artist's sense is foreign there.

Since people no longer attend church, theater remains as the only public service, and literature as the only private devotion.

When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental — far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.

Drive the women from the bed just as you drove them from the choir; a eunuch sings in Rome, and the priests masturbate.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

How frightening it is to have reached the height of human accomplishment in art that must forever borrow from life's abundance.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.