The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.

Poetry and philosophy are, according to how you take them, different spheres, different forms, or factors of religion. Try to really combine both, and you will have nothing but religion.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

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.