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

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Some speak of the public as if it were someone with whom they have had dinner at the Leipzig Fair in the Hotel de Saxe. Who is this public? The public is not a thing, but rather an idea, a postulate, like the Church.

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.

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

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