A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.
Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?
A serious, honest mind understands – and can understand – nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.
Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.
No longer wanting to be a man... , dreaming of another form of failure.
The only moments I think of with relief are those when I sought to be nothing for anyone, when I blushed at the notion of leaving the slightest trace in the memory of a single human being...
The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.
In Europe, happiness stops at Vienna. Beyond, misery upon misery, since the beginning.
There are hearts into which even God cannot look without losing his innocence.
For all we tell ourselves about not outliving a stillborn babe, instead of clearing out at the first opportunity, we cling, with lunatic energy, to one day more.
When I think of all the agonies on this earth, I know there are souls which could not be lifted by cohorts of angels, so heavy they will not be able to rise at the Last Judgement, frozen in the barenness of their own curses. Only light souls can be saved: those whose weight will not break the wings of angels.
Paganism is the deepening of appearances, while saintliness is the sickness of depths.
If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?
The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...
I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point.
There are tears which pierce through the earth and rise as stars in other skies. I wonder who has wept our stars?
A man who survives himself despises himself without acknowledging as much, sometimes without even knowing as much.
We cannot do without the notion of progress, yet it does not deserve our attention. It is like the ‘meaning’ of life. Life must have one. But is there any which does not turn out, upon examination, to be ludicrous?
If only I could reach the level of the man I would have liked to be! But some power, increasing year by year, draws me down.