The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.

Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Whoever would do good in the world, ought not to deal in censure. We ought not to destroy, but rather construct.

Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.