"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."

"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."

"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."

"The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas."

"Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates."

"To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism."

"If someone were to think that trees are made to support the sky, they would all seem too short."

"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."

"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."

"To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet."

"Prose talks and poetry sings."

"If we notice a few errors in the work of a proven master, we may and even will often be correct; if we believe, however, that he is completely and utterly mistaken, we are in danger of missing his entire concept."

"Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself."

"I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow."

"You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend."

"There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son."

"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."

"Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave."

"The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval."

"No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own."

"When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience."

"No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require."

"Although your knowledge is weak and small, you need not be silent: since you cannot be judges be at least witnesses."

"Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun."

"Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process."

"Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass."