“A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.”
“I obviously do everything to be "hard to understand" myself”
“What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.”
“What is the strongest cure?--Victory.”
“Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.”
“What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.”
“The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.”
“What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.”
“We want to be poets of our life first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.”
“Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful--but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.”
“A change of values - that means, a change of the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.”
“Fear is the mother of morality.”
“Men after death ... are understood worse than men of the moment, but heard better.”
“Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.”
“I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.”
“In the end we love our desire and not what it is that we desire.”
“A man who whinnies with noisy laughter, surpasses all the animals in vulgarity.”
“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
“The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.”
“A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.”
“I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!”
“The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.”
“History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.”
“To produce music is also in a sense to produce children.”
“What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.”
