At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue and accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and have just been born today.
You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world, and you tried to suppress the other half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.
Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?
In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.
Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.
What is the holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life.
The voices of all creatures are in the voices of the river.
I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back.
Within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.
Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.
Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.
If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.
To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment.
Solitude is independence.
Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.
In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.
Every man’s story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration.
The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.