Morality without a sense of paradox is mean.

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

A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.

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

Many a witty inspiration is like the surprising reunion of befriended thoughts after a long separation.

Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.

The historian is a prophet looking backward.

Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.

Mysteries are feminine; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and divined.

Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

A family can develop only with a loving woman as its center.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.

The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.