Impoliteness is frequently the sign of an awkward modesty that loses its head when surprised and hopes to conceal this with rudeness.

You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys.

If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.

The child as a monument to the passion of two people; the will to oneness in two.

Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.