Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

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.

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

It is a thoughtless and immodest presumption to learn anything about art from philosophy. Some do begin as if they hoped to learnsomething new here, since philosophy cannot and should not do anything further than develop the given art experiences and the existing art concepts into a science, improve the views of art, and promote them with the help of a thoroughly scholarly art history, and produce that logical mood about these subjects too which unites absolute liberalism with absolute rigor.

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.