“There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.”

“One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.”

“I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.”

“I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.”

“What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.”

“Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.”

“In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.”