I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?

The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.

One does not know - cannot know - the best that is in one.

Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief