It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, -- it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.
A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
In the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, that fact alone would invalidate any book.
If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.
Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.
It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.
A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book -I call that vicious!
So far no one had had enough courage and intelligence to reveal me to my dear Germans. My problems are new, my psychological horizon frighteningly comprehensive, my language bold and clear; there may well be no books written in German which are richer in ideas and more independent than mine.
I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful." But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible.— Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.
No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.
Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.
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.
The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.
Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.
What good is a book that does not even transport us beyond all books?
Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief
A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.
Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.
Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows.
Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- writer.
The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.
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