What do you plan to do in the land of the sleepers? You have been floating in a sea of solitude, and the sea has borne you up. At long last, are you ready for dry land? Are you ready to drag yourself ashore?

What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent : it is indecent to be a Christian today.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

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.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.