And many such good inventions are there, that they are like woman's breasts: useful at the same time, and pleasant.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgetteth himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen.

We can destroy only as creators

We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new.

Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.