I am aware of an act of self-denial in presenting to the public verses which have no claim to make on poetic merit, simply because one cannot be poet and philosopher at the same time. This takes place solely and strictly for the sake of those who one day, in the course of time, will take such a lively interest in my philosophy that they will even desire to have some kind of personal acquaintance with its author, but which then will no longer be possible to make. Now since people dare to show their subjective inner selves more freely in poems, under the guise of metre and rhyme, than in prose, and generally communicate in a more purely human, more personal and in any case quite different way than in philosophemes, and precisely by doing so get a bit closer to their readers, so I make the sacrifice to those future sympathetic readers of a few attempts at poetry, mostly from my youth, presenting them here in the expectation that they will thank me for it. I ask any others to view this as a private matter between us, which just happens to be conducted here publicly. Publishing verse is to literature what singing solo is to society, namely an act of personal devotion – to which only the foregoing considerations have been able to motivate me.