erly
expressed must already be entirely past and must no longer personally
concern the writer. So long as the artist invents and is inspired, he
is in an unfavorable situation, at least for communicating his
concepts. He will then wish to say everything--a false tendency of
young geniuses, or an instinctively correct prejudice of old bunglers.
In this way he mistakes the value and the dignity of self-restraint,
although for the artist, as for the man, this is the first and the
last, the most needful and the highest.

We should never appeal to the spirit of antiquity as an authority.
There is this peculiarity about spirits: they cannot be grasped with
the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only
to spirits. Here, too, the briefest and most concise course would
doubtless be to prove, through good works, our possession of the faith
which alone gives salvation.

He who desires something infinite knows not what he desires; but the
converse of this proposition is not true.

In the ordinary kind of fair or even good translation it is precisely
the best part of a work that is lost.

It is impossible to offend a man if he will not be offended.

Every honest author writes for no one or for all men; he who writes
that this one or that one may read him, deserves not to be read at
all.

In the poetry of the Ancients we see the perfection of the letter: in
that of the moderns we divine the growth of the spirit.

The Germans are said to be the foremost nation of the world as regards
artistic sense and scientific genius. Very true, only--there are very
few Germans.

Almost all marriages are only concubinages, morganatic wedlock, or,
rather, provisional attempts and remote approximations to a real
marriage, the peculiar essence of which consists in the fact that more
than one person are to become but one, not in accordance with the
paradoxes of this system or that, but in harmony with all spiritual
and temporal laws. A fine concept, although its realization seems to
have many grave difficulties. For this very reason there should here
be the least possible restriction of the caprice which may well have a
word to say when it becomes a question of whether one is to be an
individual in himself or is to be merely an integral part of a
corporate personality; nor is it easy to see what objections, on
principle, could be made to a marriage a quatre. If the State,
however, is determined to hold together, even