Men show no mercy and expect no mercy, when honor calls, or when they fight for their idols or their gods.

One drop of hatred left in the cup of joy turns the most blissful draught into poison.

Even now, nature is the only flame, on which the poetic spirit feeds; from it alone it draws all its power, to it alone it speaks even in the artificial, in the man engaged in culture.

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.

We are citizens of an age, as well as of a State; and if it is held to be unseemly, or even inadmissible, for a man to cut himself off from the customs and manners of the circle in which he lives, why should it be less of a duty, in the choice of his activity, to submit his decision to the needs and the taste of his century?

I know that we often tremble at an empty terror; yet the false fancy brings a real misery.