It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.
Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
Books are a narcotic.
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.
Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.
I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.
Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.
He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.