Eternal life and the invisible world are only to be sought in God. Only within Him do all spirits dwell. He is an abyss of individuality, the only infinite plenitude.
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
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.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.
What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.
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.
Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.
A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.
Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.
Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.
When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.
Religion must completely encircle the spirit of ethical man like his element, and this luminous chaos of divine thoughts and feelings is called enthusiasm.
Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.
There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.
Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.
Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical.
