I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.

Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

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.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

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