A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.
The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.
The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child’s delight in bright pictures.
The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.
Mankind is getting smarter every day. Actually, it only seems so. At least we are making progress. We’re progressing, to be sure, ever more deeply into the forest.
If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short.
I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman’s candid brow.
Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.
No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.
Those who want to row on the ocean of human knowledge do not get far, and the storm drives those out of their course who set sail.
This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.
No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.
It’s the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.
Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.
There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.