The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.

Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all.

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

Every word is a preconceived judgment.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.