Even a friendly conversation which cannot be at any given moment be broken off voluntarily with complete arbitrariness has something illiberal about it. An artist, however, who is able and wants to express himself completely, who keeps nothing to himself and would wish to say everything he knows, is very much to be pitied.

Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.