“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.”

“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.”

“The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.”

“The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

“That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.”

“...the Germans love frankness and honesty. It is so convenient to be frank and honest. This confidingness, this complacence, this showing the cards of German honesty, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays.”

“How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?”