Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster.
The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.
Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.
Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.
Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.
The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages.
Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.
Beauty always has something remote.
The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.
Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.
A person often falls very ill in order to become someone else and then returns to health much disappointed.
In eternity everything is just beginning.
There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.
There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.
The self- explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.