Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.