Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.
In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.
Out of a brotherly love we occasionally embrace this or that somebody (because we cannot embrace everybody): but we must never letour somebody know it.
Do I advise you to love the neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from the neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for the neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.
A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.
The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges 'what harms me is harmful in itself', he knows himself to be that which in general accords honour to things, he creates values.
In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.