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.

As every crystallization is dependent upon certain physical conditions,
so every individualization of human nature depends upon the state of
the historical epoch in which it occurs. To represent these
modifications of human nature in their relative necessity is the main
task which poetry has to fulfill in contradistinction to history, and
here it can, if it attains to pure form, render a supreme service. But
it is difficult to separate the merely incidental from the main task and
then besides to avoid subjective moods; so that we scarcely have even
the beginnings of such poems as now hover before my mind.

(1847)

To present the necessary, but in the form of the accidental: that is the
whole secret of dramatic style.

If the characters do not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that
the piece affirms it? The negation of the individual factors must be so
very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to the affirmation of
the whole.

Human instit