The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.
Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it’s gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.
One can run away from anything but oneself.
Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.
We can’t forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I amcontent with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work.
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.
Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.
Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You’ve given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.
To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.
One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.
One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one’s fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives – transitoriness and oblivion.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
Besides, isn’t it confoundedly easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?
Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child’s need for sleep.
Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.