Others

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction

Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; "great men," as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction

It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen.

...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the "thoroughness of his understanding.