The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface . . .

One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

The man who is thus outside the confines of every value-combination, and has become the exclusive representative of an individual value, is metaphysically an outcast, for his autonomy presupposes the resolution and disintegration of all system into its individual elements; such a man is liberated from values and from style, and can be influenced only by the irrational.

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.