(T)here was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn't say what she did about it, but I've always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.