What do we have in common with the rosebud, which trembles because a drop of dew lies on its body?

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all goodthings--honors, treasures, beautiful women--accessible even to cowards.

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.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

The inability to lie is far from the love of truth.

Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature