One should only question gods where none but gods can reply.

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.

What is Genius?- To aspire to a lofty aim and to will the means to that aim.

It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!

The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.