“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”

“it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”

“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.”

“The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”

“That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price -- dreadful tendencies!”

“In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art.”