Just as the Romans were the only nation that was truly a nation, so our age is the first genuine age.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

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.

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

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

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.