My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grow dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.
In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.
If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?
I hope I meet lots of people with lovely eyes.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?
I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.
Human beings never submit to human beings.
The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror.
I go about saying how pained and tormented, how lonely and sad I feel, but what do I really mean by that? If I were to speak the truth, I would die.
During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.
Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true.
It occurred to me that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away my sleepless nights in hellish dread of the “realities of life” as led by human beings.
Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.
When I looked up ‘rococo’ in the dictionary a while back it was defined as ‘an ornamental style emphasizing the florid and the gorgeous, but lacking substance’, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It was so perfect. How could anything beautiful have ‘substance’ anyway? Pure beauty is always without meaning or morality.
As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much I remain outside their lives.
Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles.
I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool.
A good book is always good, no matter how many times you’ve already read it.
The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people.
Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, “Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.