Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.

The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.

When ideas become gods, consciousness of harmony becomes devotion, humility, and hope.

Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.