Since poetry is infinitely valuable, I do not understand why it should be more valuable than this or that which is also infinitelyvaluable. There are artists who perhaps do not think art to be too great, for this is impossible, and yet they are not free enough to be able to rise above their own best accomplishments.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.

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.

All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity.

Whoever has not arrived at the clear insight that there might be greatness entirely outside his own sphere for which he has no understanding, whoever does not have at least a dim inkling in which area of the human spirit this greatness might be situated: he is within his own sphere either without genius, or he has not educated himself up to the point of the classical attitude.