German writings attain popularity through a great name, or through personalities, or through good connections, or through effort,or through moderate immorality, or through accomplished incomprehensibility, or through harmonious platitude, or through versatile boredom, or through constant striving after the absolute.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

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

All the great truths are basically trivial and so we have to find new ways, preferably paradoxical ways, of expressing them, in order to keep them from falling into oblivion.

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.

If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.