People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake.
When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.
Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.
"God", "the immortality of the soul", "salvation", "the beyond"-even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them-maybe I was never childish enough for that?
Modern science has as its object as little pain as possible, as long a life as possible - hence a sort of eternal blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises of religion.
There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God.
The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime - it even presupposes it.
The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.