If, as has been said with a degree of verity, Nietzsche was primarily a musician whose philosophy had for its basis and took its ultimate aspects from the musical quality of his artistic endowment, it may be maintained with an equal amount of truth that Rilke is primarily a painter and sculptor whose poetry rests upon the fundaments of the pictorial and plastic arts.
"Poems"
Rainer Maria Rilke
Then he went on to talk of himself again, of his guiding star, saying how he had supplemented Fourier's passions by being the first to discover the "fundaments, the root principle," and how he would not go out of this world without leaving some trace behind him; how he was filled with wonder that he, a youth of twenty-four, should have solved all the problems of life and science; that he would turn the whole of Russia up-side-down, that he would "shake her up!"
"Virgin Soil"
Ivan S. Turgenev