We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.
I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me.
How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?
Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man’s free will?
Although your mind works, your heart is darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and true consciousness.
No, evidently habit means a lot. The devil knows what habit can do to a person.
I have in my own life merely carried to the extreme that which you have never ventured to carry even halfway ; and what’s more, you’ve regarded your cowardice as prudence, and found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that, in fact, I may be even more “alive” than you are. Do take a closer look!
This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out; that you will never become a different man.
It’s in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.
You must accept it as it is, and hence accept all consequences. A wall is indeed a wall.
God is the pain of the fear of death.
Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.
Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.
Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.
It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!
But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.
Don’t think I’m talking nonsense because I’m drunk. I’m not a bit drunk. Brandy’s all very well, but I need two bottles to make me drunk.
There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.
For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it.