The best way to give assistance to those who are deeply embarrassed and to calm them down is to praise them decisively.

Laughter means: taking a mischievous delight in someone else's uneasiness, but with a good conscience.

One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.

In our interactions with people, a benevolent hypocrisy is frequently required--acting as though we do not see through the motivesof their actions.

The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.

A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.

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