Excellence is rarely found, more rarely valued.

Translators can be considered as busy matchmakers who praise as extremely desirable a half-veiled beauty. They arouse an irresistible yearning for the original.

True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine.

From desire I plunge to its fulfilment, where I long once more for desire.

Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.

Hatred is partial, but love is still more so.