What do the few existing mystics still do? -- They more or less mold the raw chaos of already existing religion. But only in an isolated, insignificant manner, through feeble attempts. Do it in a grand manner from all aspects with unified efforts, and let us awaken all religions from their graves, newly revivify and form the immortal ones through the omnipotence of art and science.

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

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

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

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

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.