“The historian is a prophet looking backwards.”

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

“Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.”

“What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.”

“From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.”

“Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.”

“Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is 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?”

“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.”

“Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.”

“One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.”