The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author’s book at all, but rather in the reader’s head.
Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.
Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.
The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own – that is, for his age – so as to be able even then to take pleasurein himself.
We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.
Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.
Many writers are neither spirit nor wine, but rather spirits- of-wine: they can catch fire, and then they give off heat.
Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.
The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.
Today a man of knowledge might well feel as though he were God transformed into an animal.
We no longer love our knowledge enough once we have passed it on.
Only with the ultimate knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man.
Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are andso makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.
From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses.
Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder – but not the ladder.
On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks!
Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light – I call it a divine capacity for lightness.
Many deeds are done so as to forget another deed: there are also opiate activities. I exist so that another will be forgotten.
In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred means employed here can sanctify the end.
It is with artworks as it is with wine: it is much better when we do not need either one, when we stick with water, and when out of our own inner fire, the inner sweetness of our own soul, we turn the water over and over again into wine ourselves.