Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens.
His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.
First impressions are always unreliable.
The Messiah will only come when he is no longer needed.
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.
The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.
The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.
In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.
Writing means revealing oneself to excess.
The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.
I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.
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.