Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows.

Learn to laugh at yourselves as one must laugh!

Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.

Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed in great variety among Germans.

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