The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should…

There is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life:It is the meaning at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its cle…

Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaningof a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'