The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.

Original love never appears in pure form, but in manifold veils and shapes, such as confidence, humility, reverence, serenity, asfaithfulness and modesty, as gratefulness; but primarily as longing and wistful melancholy.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

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.

The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a higher caste, not ennobled by birth, however, but through deliberate self-initiation.

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

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.