I utter what you would not dare think.
Everything will come in due course, if you have the gumption to wait for it.
Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.
Or renounce life altogether! Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love.
We are all happy if we but knew it.
Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.
We don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.
Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.
It’s curious and ridiculous how much the gaze of a prudish and painfully chaste man touched by love can sometimes express and that precisely at a moment when the man would of course sooner be glad to fall through the earth than to express anything with a word or a look.
We are citizens of eternity.
A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.
What is the use of Christ’s words, unless we set an example?
Everything passes, only truth remains.
How good life is when one does something good and just!
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it’s for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!
People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.
I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you – and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.