Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Friendship, love, and piety ought to be handled with a sort of mysterious secrecy; they ought to be spoken of only in the rare moments of perfect confidence, to be mutually understood in silence. Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.

Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates--hence the deadly frost--the free power of the mind--the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more--the person is alone, like a baleful power--as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually--and in accordance with his own principle he is--misanthropic and misotheos.

Character is a wish for a perfect education.

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

The world must become romanticized, and in that way we find again its original meaning for us.