What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.

The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy

Man makes god in his own image.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.