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.

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.

God the father, and even more often the devil himself, appears at times in the place of fate in the modern tragedy. Why is it thatthis has not induced any scholar to develop a theory of the diabolical genre?

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.