Devilish in my innocence.
I am so miserable, there are so many questions, I can see no way out and am so wretched and feeble that I could lie forever on the sofa and keep opening and closing my eyes without knowing the difference.
Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.
A man might find for a moment that he was unable to work, but that’s exactly the right time to remember his past accomplishments and to consider that later on, when the obstacles has been removed, he’s bound to work all the harder and more efficiently.
He looked sadly down at the street, as though it were his own bottomless sadness.
If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.
When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?
What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life. In its heights and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.
His growing lack of concern for the others hardly surprised him, whereas previously he had prided himself on being considerate.
Don’t concern yourself about anybody. Just do what you think is right.
Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?
Agreement is the best weapon of defense – and the matter would be buried.
Today one may pluck out one’s very heart and not find it.
Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against a man who wants to live.
In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat.
Asking questions were the most important thing.
Above all, the free man is superior to the man who has to serve another.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
I did not fall heavily, nor did I feel any pain, but I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be one’s guard against them. Yet nothing seemed more natural than to lie here on the grass, my arms beside my body, my face hidden.