"What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men."

"Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts."

"Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal."

"Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do."

"Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos."

"Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man."

"The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion."

"Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss."

"Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth."

"Religion is not only a part of education, an element of humanity, but the center of everything else, always the first and the ultimate, the absolutely original."

"Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation."

"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."

"Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem."

"One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one."

"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."

"Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time."

"Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science."

"Man is free whenever he produces or manifests God, and through this he becomes immortal."

"An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind."

"Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime."

"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

"Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin."

"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."

"The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages."

"The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history."

"Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself."

"Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism."

"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."

"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."

"An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog."

"The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary."

"There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age."