Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.
Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.
Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.
What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.
All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, – the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.
Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.
Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? – The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.
A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.
What for others is style, for me is soul.
The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.
The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter.
Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.