Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.