He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

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.

Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.

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.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

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