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.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.

Good drama must be drastic.

The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.