The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.
It would not be worth your while to reach the age of seventy if all the wisdom of the world were to be foolishness before God.
Every need whose true satisfaction is denied leads by necessity to faith.
All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.
The force of a language does not consist of rejecting what is foreign but of swallowing it.
I curse all negative purism that tells me not to use a word from another language that either expresses something that my own language cannot or does that in a more delicate manner.
True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.
Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.
A stated truth loses its grace, but a repeated error appears insipid and ridiculous.
Idea and experience will never coincide in the center; only through art and action are they united.
There are but few who have ideas and are, at the same time, capable of action. Ideas enlarge but stymie, action enlivens but confines.
That is the way of youth and life in general: that we do not understand the strategy until after the campaign is over.
To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.
What matters in art is not thinking but making.
Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of beingcreated so as to understand them to some degree.
Only that type of story deserves to be called moral that shows us that one has the power within oneself to act, out of the conviction that there is something better, even against one’s own inclination.
The eternal feminine draws us up.
Association with women is the basis of good manners.
What is predestination? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are, therefore he deals with us according to his pleasure.
National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.