How many kings are governed by their ministers, how many ministers by their secretaries? Who, in such cases, is really the chief?

My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.

Every solution of a problem is a new problem.

I am the Spirit that denies.

The hardest thing is to see what's under your very eyes.

There is nothing more frightful than for a teacher to know only what his scholars are intended to know.

By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.