All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.

The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.

Here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master… Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and go? ‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will.

To regard states of distress in general as an objection, as something which must be abolished is the greatest nonsense on earth; having the most disastrous consequences, fatally stupid- almost as stupid as a wish to abolish bad weather - out of pity for the poor.

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.