FROM THE BOOK OF FRIENDS
Allegory is an important vehicle which must not be despised. To show what friends really are to one another we must turn to the magic horn and the magic ring, rather than to psychology.
Of those whom destiny has really driven to play-acting, the heroic and tragic players are in flight from the ego, the comedians from the world.
The significant Germans always seem to be swimming under water; Goethe alone whips across the flickering surface like a solitary dolphin.
Balzac is the nearest approach of the French spirit to the German mode of thought and expression; in the second half of his life Goethe marks the corresponding reversal of this tendency.
Nature executes her purposes in the haze of a non-understanding; this is also the relation of the poet to his spiritual product.
Talent is not the deed; legs are not the dance.
The historians of literature make a dreadful to-do of certain externals, but at the same time they overlook what applies to the single artist in his individual case. Racine lays all his stress on inner decisions; what value to him would there be in Shakespeare's continual change of setting? The four walls of a noble's chamber, almost barren in their dignity, are sufficient, to a symbolic degree, for his needs.
The usual writer tells how something might possibly come to pass. The good writer makes it occur before our eyes as though actually present. The master tells something as though it had happened long ago and is happening again.
