He is happy as well as great who needs neither to obey nor to command in order to be something.

The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude. --Faust 1, lines 182-3

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.

What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

The Primal Plant is going be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself must envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadowy phantoms of a vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth. The same law will be applicable to all other living organisms.

All sects seem to me to be right in what they assert, and wrong in what they deny.