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“I cannot think of it without feeling violently shaken, so elevated was I by it, so deeply moved. It was as if someone were speaking to me again, after many years, about the problems that disturb me – naturally not supplying the answers I would give, but the Christian answer, which after all has been the answer of stronger souls than the last two centuries of our era have produced. When listening to this music one lays Protestantism aside as a misunderstanding – and also, I will not deny it, other really good music, which I have at other times heard and loved, seems, as against this, a misunderstanding!”
- Nietzsche on Wagner's Parsifal
"This Jekyll-and-Hyde character corresponds to the social existence, and hence to the emotional and intellectual world, of this class in a triple sense. Firstly, an oscillation between the most acute feeling for nuance, the keenest over sensitivity, and a suddenly erupting, often hysterical brutality is always an intrinsic sign of decadence. Secondly, it is very closely linked with a deep dissatisfaction concerning contemporary culture: an ‘unease about culture’ in Freud’s phrase, a revolt against it. Under no circumstances, however, would the ‘rebel’ stomach any interference with his own parasitical privileges and their basis in society. He therefore waxes enthusiastic if the revolutionary character of his discontent receives a philosophical sanction, but is at the same time deflected — with regard to its social substance — into a rebuttal of democracy and socialism. And thirdly, it was just at the time of Nietzsche’s activity that the class decline, the decadent tendencies reached such a pitch that their subjective evaluation within the bourgeois class also underwent a significant change. For a long while, only the progressive opposition critics had been exposing and condemning the symptoms of decadence, whereas the vast majority of the bourgeois intelligentsia clung to the illusion of living in the ‘best of all worlds’, defending what they supposed to be the ‘healthy condition’ and the progressive nature of their ideology. Now, however, an insight into their own decadence was becoming more and more the hub of these intellectuals’ self-knowledge. This change manifested itself above all in a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, etc. But in the case of honest intellectuals, these often turned into sincere despair and a consequent mood of revolt."
- Lukács on Nietzsche