Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.

A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.