It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men’s lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.
There are men who are wanting in the comparative, they as a rule are the most interesting.
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.
Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven – in the spring at the earth.
To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain ‘importance’ – I can think of nothing more ridiculous.
Boredom rests upon the nothingness that winds its way through existence; its giddiness, like that which comes from gazing down into an infinite abyss, is infinite.
Dread is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy...
What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring.
Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than “The Individual.”
God does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.
Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes – but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.
Backwards understood be only can but, forwards lived be must life.
Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.
There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.