It was the sick and decaying who despised the body and earth and invented the heavenly realm and the redemptive drops of blood: but they took even these sweet and gloomy poisons from body and earth. They wanted to escape their own misery, and the stars were too far for them.

...If I continued to harbour any hope for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it.

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

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

For some natures, changing their opinions is just as much a requirement of cleanliness as changing their clothes: for others, however, it is merely a requirement of vanity.

Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.