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.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

Nothing is more piquant than when a man of genius possesses mannerisms; not so when they possess him -- this leads to spiritual petrification.

Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.

The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.

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

One of the two is almost always a prevailing tendency of every author: either not to say some things which certainly should be said, or to say many things which did not need to be said. The first is the original sin of synthetic natures, the latter of analytical natures.