Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.
A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
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...
A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.
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.
He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
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.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
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.