Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.

Compilers resemble gluttonous eaters who devour excessive quantities of healthy food just to excrete them as refuse.

Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

Schiller moves upward. Goethe comes from up above.

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.

When we interpret nature, we refer phenomena that are rarely entirely unintelligible back to something that actually exists, but is equally unintelligible.