Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.

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

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.

It is a thoughtless and immodest presumption to learn anything about art from philosophy. Some do begin as if they hoped to learnsomething new here, since philosophy cannot and should not do anything further than develop the given art experiences and the existing art concepts into a science, improve the views of art, and promote them with the help of a thoroughly scholarly art history, and produce that logical mood about these subjects too which unites absolute liberalism with absolute rigor.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.

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