If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars.
There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness!
There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.
The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness…
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.