Professor Quotes

“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.”

“Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”

“What is originality? To see something that is as yet without a name, that is as yet impossible to designate, even though it staresus in the face. The way it usually is with people, it is a thing's name that makes it perceptible to them in the first place.--For the most part, the original ones have also been the name-givers.”

“Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!”

“Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.”

“He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.”

“Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen and entered upon as a means to a purpose but is ultimately continued as a final purpose in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in which we indulge ourselves.”

“Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.”

“It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot.”