Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.

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

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.

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.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.

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.