In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.