“Love appears to me, indeed, as the offer of heaven.”

From a long, unusually candid letter in which he set out his philosophy of love as a redemptive, almost sacred force rather than mere sentiment · Letter to Helen Snee, 22 May 1870

• Faith
• Love

“Myself a young disciple.”

His modest description of his relationship to the recently deceased poet Ferdinand Freiligrath · Letter to Käthe Freiligrath-Kroeker, 20 March 1876

• Friendship
• Mortality
• Poetry

“But with Victor Hugo I do not say, ‘Art for Art’, but ‘Art for humanity’.”

Expressing his belief that art should ultimately serve and enrich human life · Letter quoted in the preface to Songs of a Worker (1881)

• Art
• Hope