A person's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood:
how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time of life to
live without play and fairy tales! We give these things other names, to be
sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence
that they are the same things - for the child too regards play as his work
and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a
pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought
something new - and a poet ought for once to present a man of two
hundred: one, that is, who really does live without play and fairy tales.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.

The Germans -- once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things. . .