“The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul; if these inner movements are plainly difficult and an effort for him, he is considered soulless.”

“What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?”

“Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. ”

“Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.”

“God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.”

“In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.”

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”