as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!

The enormous expectation having to do with sexual love and the shame involved in this expectation degrades all a woman's perspectives from the start.

The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.

A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?