You wanted to destroy philosophy and poetry in order to make room for religion and morality which you misunderstood: but you wereable to destroy only yourself.

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

Wit is the appearance, the external flash, of fantasy. Hence its divinity and the similarity to the wit of mysticism.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.