To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Art is the great stimulus to life.

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest!

God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment-but many other things ceased as well!