If nature is your teacher, your soul will awaken.

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.

As soon as you are in a social setting, you better take away the key to the lock of your heart and pocket it; those who leave thekey in the lock are fools.

When one is polite in German, one lies.

What people call the spirit of the times is mostly their own spirit in which the times mirror themselves.

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

If everyone sweeps before his own front door, then the street is clean.