You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.

One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.

Give up the tyranny of female charm.

Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.