Imagination must first be filled to the point of saturation with life of every kind before the moment arrives when the friction of free sociability electrifies it to such an extent that the most gentle stimulus of friendly or hostile contact elicits from it lightning sparks, luminous flashes, or shattering blows.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.

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

True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.

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?

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.