I don't need money, or, better, it's not money that I need; it's not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over!

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?

I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard.

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts.