“He isn’t a man who tries to lead others astray; on the contrary he dissuades them from leading such a life. He has tasted its bitterness and puts up with it only because he lives for an idea…Rather I would think of such a master thief as someone who had lost his father early in [...] […]

“In order that everything should be reduced to the same level it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, a spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage — and that phantom is the public. It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such [...] […]

“In a logical system, it is convenient to say that possibility passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is anxiety… Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free [...] […]

“A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant. The qualification ‘public’ is produced by the deceptive juggling of an age [...] […]

“He isn’t a man who tries to lead others astray; on the contrary he dissuades them from leading such a life. He has tasted its bitterness and puts up with it only because he lives for an idea…Rather I would think of such a master thief as someone who had lost his father early in [...] […]

“There is no good calling upon a Holder Danske or a Martin Luther; their day is over, and at bottom it is only the individual’s laziness which makes a man long to have them back, a worldly impatience which prefers to buy something cheap, second-hand, rather than to buy the highest of all things very [...] […]

“So long as one is a child one has sufficient imagination, though it were for an hour in the dark room, to keep one’s soul on tiptoe, on the tiptoe of expectation; but when one is older, imagination easily has the effect of making one tired of the Christmas tree before one has a chance [...] […]

“There is, namely, an infinite chasmic difference between God and man, and therefore it became clear in the situation of contemporaneity that to become a Christian (to be transformed into likeness with God) is, humanly speaking, an even greater torment and misery and pain than the greatest human torment, and in addition a crime in [...] […]