The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
Art raises its head where creeds relax.
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.
Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
I obviously do everything to be “hard to understand” myself.
Only idiots fail to contradict themselves three times a day.
We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.
What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives acts and experiences otherwise than we do?
What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.
That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much.
It is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.
I am really very, very tired of everything – more than tired.
Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.
Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them, is not something dreadful also.
Never to talk about oneself is a very refined form of hypocrisy.
At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them.