A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.

Good drama must be drastic.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

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.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.