Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it that is great, that belongs to greatness.
That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe-the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.
Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole,he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.
Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.
When good friends praise a gifted person he often appears to be delighted with them out of politeness and goodwill, but in reality he feels indifferent.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.
Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.