The love of indulgence is rooted in the depths of a man's heart. His soul would prefer to share the excessive and unrestrained; but his soul cannot love.

God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is ? a vice?

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.

Every word is a preconceived judgment.

The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.

The strongest and most evil spirits have to date advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions - all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan.