It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.
This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.
I am convinced that God is love, this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than does the lover for his object.
Sleeping is the height of genius.
You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?
I’m so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I’m misunderstood.
What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.
The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.
Most people live dejectedly in worldly joys or sorrows. They sit on the sidelines and do not join the dance.
A genius may perhaps be a century ahead of his age and hence stands there as a paradox, but in the end, the race will assimilate what was once a paradox, so it is no longer paradoxical.
The human race in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament...
Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions and millions.
I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it – alas, not even the bliss of heaven.
It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.
Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.
A ‘no’ does not hide anything, but a ‘yes’ very easily becomes a deception.
What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.
My sorrow is my castle.
Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.