I would only believe in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgetteth himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

In all institutions from which the cold wind of open criticism is excluded, an innocent corruption begins to grow like a mushroom - for example, in senates and learned societies

The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.

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.