Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.

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

Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.

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.

The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

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.

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

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

Witty inspirations are the proverbs of the educated.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

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.

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

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

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

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

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.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

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

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