utions require a man to be a man like other men; but man,
whoever and whatever he may be, wishes to be an individual, indeed is,
as such, individualized. Hence the rupture.

Let the understanding question in a work of art, but do not let it
answer.

(1848)

The understanding no more makes poetry than salt makes food, but it is
necessary to poetry as salt is to food.

(1849)

One does not sit down to play on the piano in order to verify
mathematical laws. Just as little does one write poetry in order to
demonstrate something. Oh, if people would only learn to comprehend
that! Indeed the beauty of all the higher activity of man is precisely
the fact, that ends which the individual never even thinks of are
attained thereby.

(1853)

The process of dramatic individualization is perhaps best illustrated by
comparison to water. Everywhere water is water and man is man, but as
the former acquires a mysterious flavor from every stratum of earth that
it flows or trickles through, so man acquires a peculiarity from his
time, his nation, history, and fate.

(1857) Man would perhaps still have as acute senses as animals, if
thinking did not divert him from the outer world.

(1859)

Ideas are the same thing in the drama that counterpoint is in music;
nothing in themselves but the primary condition for everything.

(1861)

(Concerning my _Nibelungen_.)

It seems to me that a purely human tragedy, natural in all its motifs,
can be constructed upon the mythical foundation inseparable from this
subject, and that so far as my powers permit I have constructed one. The
mysticism of the background should at most remind us that what we hear
in this poem is not the seconds' clock, which measures off the existence
of gnats and ants, but the clock that marks the hours only. Let the
reader who is nevertheless disturbed by the mythical foundation consider
that, if he examines closely, he will also discover such a basis in man
himself, and that, too, in the mere man, in the representative of the
species, and not only in the more specific branch of the same, in the
individual. Or may man's fundamental qualities, either physical or
mental, be accounted for, that is to say, can they be deduced from any
other organic canon than the one which has been posited once for all
with man himself, and which cannot be traced farther back to a final
primitive cause of things, or be critically resolved into its
components? Are they not in part,