Sometimes we remain true to a cause simply because its opponents are unfailingly tasteless.

The strongest and most evil spirits have to date advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions - all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan.

And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.

To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me - and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.

The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, noris it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.