Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.

The relatives of a suicide hold it against him that out of consideration for their reputation he did not remain alive.

What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

One must repay good and ill; but why just to the person who did us good or ill?

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.

We grow hostile to many an artist or writer, not because we finally come to see he has deceived us, but because he thought no subtler means were required to ensnare us.