"Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do"
"If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry"
"Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts"
"How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator"
"He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion"
"He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her"
"God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?"
"From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be"
"Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine"
"An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind"
"An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog"
"All the classical genres are now ridiculous in their rigorous purity"
"All men are somewhat ridiculous and grotesque, just because they are men; and in this respect artists might well be regarded as man multiplied by two. So it is, was, and shall be"
"About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy"
"A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song"
"A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory"
"A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center"
"A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named"
"A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach"
"A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it"
