To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

The person who in shaky times also wavers only increases the evil, but the person of firm decision fashions the universe.

There is no better deliverance from the world than through art, and a man can form no surer bond with it.

Everything is simpler than one can imagine, and yet complicated and inter-twined beyond comprehension.

Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.