What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

Everything is politics.

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

What is uttered is finished and done with.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

Speech is civilization itself.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

It could become much worse.

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!