The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.

Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

When ideas become gods, consciousness of harmony becomes devotion, humility, and hope.

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

The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.