Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.

Speaking of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.

Pity is extolled as the virtue of prostitutes.

One does not know - cannot know - the best that is in one.