What’s most revolting is that one is really sad! No, it’s better at home. Here at least one blames others for everything and excuses oneself.
Everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness.
You are going to perform a virtuous deed, but you don’t even believe in virtue – that’s what makes you angry and torments you, that’s why you’re so vindictive.
Man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower.
It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth.
Fancy pants, the monk can dance!
Perhaps,” you will add, grinning, “those who have never been slapped will also not understand” – thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur.
He’s an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
We have facts,’ they say. But facts are not everything – at least half the business lies in how you interpret them!
It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you.
That makes it worse! Worse and better!
But I tell you what it is; an honest and sensitive man is open; and a business man ‘listens and goes on eating’ you up.
Do you know that centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men? Feed them first, then ask virtue of them.
If we’re to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face – love vanishes.
I just said it for the beauty of the style.
You’ve already said all that. Don’t embroider on it, but prove it!
To confess one’s guilt and one’s original sin is little, very little; one must wean oneself away from them completely. And that takes more than a little time.
For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.
I exaggerate everything, that is where I go wrong.
Then the great hour struck, and every man showed himself in his true colors.