an inexplicable mystery, but one that may not be denied.  Man, therefore, cannot be brought before us as something complete in himself; for not how he affects the world but how the world affects him arouses our interest and is of importance to us; the great forces and powers outside of him find embodiment by exerting an influence over him, and thus lose their formidableness, the riddle of the universe is solved as soon as it finds utterance, and even though at the end a question remains, we can bear this much easier than an empty nothing.

Not only in art but in history as well life sometimes assumes a form, and art should not seek her subjects and her themes where this has occurred.

God was a mystery to Himself before the creation; He had to create in order to understand Himself.  If only some one thing had been completely explained, then everything would be explained.

The motives before a deed are usually transformed during the deed, and at least seem quite different after the deed:  this is an important circumstance which most dramatists overlook.

Lyric poetry has something childlike about it, dramatic poetry something manly, epic poetry something senile.

Two hands can indeed clasp one another but cannot grow together.  This is the relation of one individuality to another.

(1840)

From my conception of form many consequences ensue of the most varied kind.  In reference to lyric poetry:  the whole emotional life is a shower, the emotion which is singled out is a drop illumined by the sun.  Dramatic poetry:  form is the point where divine and human strength neutralize one another.

The true idyll results when a man is represented as happy and complete in himself within his own appointed sphere.  So long as he remains within this sphere fate has no power over him.

Poetry of the highest kind is the true historiography.  It grasps the result of historical processes and holds it fast in imperishable images as, for example, Sophocles has done with the idea of Hellenism.

All life is a struggle of the individual with the universe.

Duality pervades all our intuitions and thoughts and every moment of our being, and is our supreme, our last idea.  Beside it we, have absolutely no fundamental idea.  Life and death, health and sickness, time and eternity:  we can imagine and picture to ourselves how one gradually shades off into the other, but not that which lies behind these divided dualities as a common solvent and reconciliation. (1841)

Antigone, representing as it does a romantic individual subject in a classical form, is the masterpiece of tragic art.

Life is the attempt of the defiantly refractory part to tear itself loose from the whole and to exist for itself, an attempt that succeeds just so long as the strength endures which was robbed from the whole by the individual separation.

“What a man can become, that he is already.”  God will not lay the decisive weight on the sins committed by sinful individuals against one another but only on the sins committed against the idea itself, and there actual and merely possible sins are one and the same.