If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.
This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.
Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.
The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go – not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes ‘fast’ like a watch – sometimes.
Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.
Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.
Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.
I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?
Simply wait, be quiet, be still. The world will freely offer itself to you.
From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.
I, however, cannot force myself to use “meat drugs” to cheat on my loneliness.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.
Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle – maybe there is none.