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About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy.
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Every complete man has his genius. True virtue is genius.
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Set religion free, and a new humanity will begin.
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When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
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Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
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Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
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Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
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There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.
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Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
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Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.
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Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
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Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
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He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
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Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.
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God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?
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There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.
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Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
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Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality.
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An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
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The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
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Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
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A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
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Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.
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Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.