Every man needs a place to go to.
Life is what matters, life alone – the continuous, eternal process of discovering life – and not the discovery itself.
I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.
If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.
Humiliate the reason and distort the soul.
How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
That’s always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.
And in fact you’re not like everyone else: you weren’t ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.
Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions – it’s like a dream.
Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!
A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is.
In a way there’s only a fine shade of difference between the healthy and the deranged.
For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.
Can a man possessing conciousness ever really respect himself?
A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.
Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous.
There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.
It’s a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.
In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.