The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.
It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.
The love of indulgence is rooted in the depths of a man's heart. His soul would prefer to share the excessive and unrestrained; but his soul cannot love.
There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: we see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.
What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.
Shackled heart, free spirit.--Whoever binds his heart tightly and imprisons it may indulge his spirit in many liberties: I have already said that once. But no one believes me unless he already knows.
This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.
It is within your power to see that all you have experienced, trials, errors, faults, deceptions, passions, your love and your hope, shall be merged wholly in your aim.
The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better.".