The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.
In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.
Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.
I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children's land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea; for this I bid my sails search and search.
You may have enemies whom you hate, but not enemies whom you despise. You must be proud of your enemy: then the success of your enemy shall be your success too.
We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new.
We find nothing easier than being wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of forbearance and sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything. For that very reason we ought to discipline ourselves a little; for that very reason we ought to cultivate a little emotion, a little emotional vice, from time to time. It may be hard for us; and among ourselves we may perhaps laugh at the appearance we thus present. But what of that! We no longer have any other mode of self-overcoming available to us: this is our asceticism, our penance.
Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.