All parties attempt to represent important things that have developed outside themselves as unimportant, and where they fail in this they assail those things all the more bitterly the more admirable they are.
There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.
To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.
So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.
From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.