“I am one thing, my writings are another.”

“But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.”

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood; I hate the reading idlers.He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers--and spirit itself will stink.Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace.He that writeth in blood and proverbs doth not want to be read, but learnt by heart.In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness: thus are things well matched.I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage which scareth away ghosts, createth for itself goblins--it wanteth to laugh.”

“But I am still far from them, and my sense does not speak to their sense. To men I am something between a fool and a corpse.”

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”

“one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.”