Respectability offends my taste.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

That, however, is - mediocrity, though it be called moderation.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.