... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.

... we engage in politics because we don't know anything. This is clearly revealed in the way we go about it. Our parties exist from a fear of theory. The voter fears that one idea can always be contradicted by another. Therefore the parties reciprocally defend themselves against the few old ideas they have inherited. They don't live from what they promise, but from frustrating the promises of others. This is their silent community of interests.

What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.

It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream - the life that now lay open before him.