You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself. Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

A refined soul is distressed to know that someone owes it thanks; a crude soul, to know that it owes someone thanks.

The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.

Whether in conversation we generally agree or disagree with others is largely a matter of habit: the one tendency makes as much sense as the other.

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

I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful." But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible.— Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.