In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.
A cure by regression is homeopathic, like healing the damage done by ministers and ignorance with stupidity and Jesuits.
It's actually the spirit helping the spirit; it is the doctor, the bed, the potion.
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
The ideas of an age are most abundant where they are not crowded by original ideas.
Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.
To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
Before passing different laws for different people, I'd relinquish myself unto you as your slave.
Art is eternally young, but the poet ages. If only he remained as young as art! If only it aged with him!
Gold schenkt die Eitelkeit, der rauhe Stolz, Die Freundschaft und die Liebe schenken Blumen. Gold is the gift of vanityand pride, Friendship and love offer flowers.
What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.
Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors? Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).
The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.
A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he candivide.
Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.
Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.
My anger thought you too ignoble for my love, and close examination finds you too magnificent, and only equals are joined together smoothly.
At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.
To test a modest man's modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism.
This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.
Ideas are not thoughts; the thought respects the boundaries that the idea ignores thereby failing to realize itself.
I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.
