Out of my own great woe I make my little songs.

All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

All special charters of freedom must be abrogated where the universal law of freedom is to flourish.

I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives.

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.

Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.