The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

What can it matter to us what tinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes one mild, oh so mild, so righteous, so inoffensive, so humane!

Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.

Never to talk about oneself is a very refined form of hypocrisy.

All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: to believe in an existence that can in no way be denied and which is itself true and without falsehood.

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.