But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs – is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.
God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don’t throw out the best part of ourselves.
Sleep is no mean art.
Speaking of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.
Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play.
When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything.
Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.
Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
All great artists and thinkers are great workers.
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.
People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.
From people who merely pray we must become people who bless.
When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.
That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe-the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.
Man and man’s earth are unexhausted and undiscovered. Wake and listen! Verily, the earth shall yet be a source of recovery. Remain faithful to the earth, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth.
I am not bigoted enough for a system-and not even for my system.
You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?