The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.

Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed.

Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.

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.

Thus one can observe that those who proclaim piety as their goal and purpose usually turn into hypocrites.

A wife is a gift bestowed upon a man to reconcile him to the loss of paradise.

He who moves not forward, goes backward.