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

When the author has no idea of what to reply to a critic, he then likes to say: you could not do it better anyway. This is the same as if a dogmatic philosopher reproached a skeptic for not being able to devise a system.

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.

All thinking of the religious man is etymological, a reduction of all concepts to the original intuition, to the characteristic.

Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

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

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

Because Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life.

The two basic maxims of the so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the common and the axiom of the ordinary. Postulate of the common: everything really great, good, and beautiful, is improbable, since it is extraordinary and therefore at least suspect. Axiom of the ordinary: our conditions and environment must have existed everywhere, for they are really so natural.

We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things; they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.

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

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: And behold, what he had done was good.

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.

Most thoughts are only profiles of thoughts. They must be inverted and synthesized with their antipodes. Thus many philosophical writings become very interesting which would not have been so otherwise.

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