A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.
What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?
A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.
Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.
The English are a nation of consummate cant.
Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat. – Whoever says nowadays, “I have not experienced anything” – is a simpleton.
Not infrequently, we encounter copies of important human beings; and here, too, as in the case of paintings, most people prefer the copies to the originals.
All rejection and negation indicates a deficiency in fertility: fundamentally, if only we were good plowland we would allow nothing to go unused, and in every thing, event, and person we would welcome manure, rain, or sunshine.
What saved me then? Nothing but pregnancy. And each time after I had given birth to my work my life hung suspended by a thin thread.
I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.
Pain makes hens and poets cackle.
As refined fare serves a hungry man as well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.
Assuming that rapture is nature’s play with man, the Dionysian artist’s creative activity is the play with rapture.
One is proud to worship when he cannot be an idol.
From passions grow opinions; intellectual laziness lets these harden into convictions.
The enormous expectation having to do with sexual love and the shame involved in this expectation degrades all a woman’s perspectives from the start.
Love brings to light the lofty and hidden characteristics of the lover – what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it caneasily be deceptive with respect to what is normal in him.
In every form of womanly love something of motherly love also comes to light.
Sometimes it just takes stronger eyeglasses to cure those who are in love – and someone with the ability to imagine a face or a figure twenty years older might perhaps pass through life quite undisturbed.
Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.