Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.