(1843)

Expiation in tragedy occurs in the interest of the community, not in that of the individual, the hero, and it is not at all necessary, although it is better, that he himself should be conscious of it.  Life is the great river, individualities are drops; tragic individualities are, however, blocks of ice which must be liquefied again, and in order that this may be possible they must break and wear themselves away one against the other.

There is only one necessity, which is that the world should continue to exist; what happens to individuals in the world is of no consequence.  The evil that they commit must be punished because it endangers the existence of the world; but there is no reason why they should be indemnified for the misfortune that befalls them.

(1844)

Absolutely everything depends upon a right conception of guilt.  Guilt must not, in any direction, be confounded with the subordinate conception of sin, which even in the modern drama—­where indeed it finds, for reasons which are not far to seek, a wider scope than in the ancient—­must always be merged again into the conception of guilt, if the drama is to rise above the anecdotal to the symbolical.  For the conception of tragic guilt can be developed only from life itself, from the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon—­which incongruity manifests itself in the phenomenon as extravagance, the natural consequence of the instinct of self-preservation and self-assertion, the first and most legitimate of all instincts.  But it cannot be developed from one of the many consequences of this original incongruity, which lead us too far down into the errors and aberrations of the individual to allow the working out of the highest dramatic possibilities.  So, too, the conception of tragic expiation should be developed only from extravagance, which, since it is irrepressible in the phenomenon, represses the phenomenon, and thus frees the idea again from its imperfect form.  It is true the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon remains unremoved and unovercome; but it is evident that in the sphere of life, which art, so long as it understands itself, will never go beyond, nothing can be removed that lies outside this sphere, and that art reaches its supreme goal when it seizes upon the immediate consequence of this incongruity, extravagance, and points out in it the element of self-destruction; but leaves the incongruity enshrouded in the darkness of creation, unexplained, as a fact immediately posited.

(1845)

A genuine drama may be compared to one of those great buildings which have almost as many passages and rooms below the earth as above it.  Ordinary people only know the former; the architect knows the latter also.

A king has less right than any other person to be an individual.

(1846)

In the poet humanity dreams.  Decidedly, a dream is for the spirit what sleep is for the body.