All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.