When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Everyone only hears what he understands.

We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to.

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.

Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.

It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.