You can choose to be free, but it’s last decision you’ll ever make.
The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.
Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.
The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.
Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.
Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.
It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
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.