But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.
For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.
In times of exceptional stress, nature will often give people’s behavior so tragical a complexion that neither a picture nor a verbal description is competent to represent its titanic energy.
And the child – your child – was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.
All the bourgeois virtues, caution, obedience, zeal and thoughtfulness- they all melt away powerless in the fire of the great fateful moment that always demands only genius and forms it into a a lasting image. Contemptuously it repulses the timid man; it, another god of the earth, with fiery arms, lifts only the bold into the heaven of heroes.
No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.
I saw how the idea, still colourless, nothing but pure and flowing heat, streamed from the furnace of his impulsive excitement like the molten metal to make a bell, then gradually, as it cooled, took shape, I saw how that shape rounded out powerfully and revealed itself, until at last the words rang from it and gave human language to poetic feeling, just as the clapper gives the bell its sound.
Time is helpless, he thought to himself, helpless in the face of our feelings. Nine years have passed, and not a note in her voice is different, not a nerve in my body hears her in any other way. Nothing is lost, nothing is past and over, her presence is as much of a tender delight now as it was then.
He had no taste for his own company and avoided such an encounter as much as possible, for the last thing he wanted was to make close acquaintance with himself.
Books are my kingdom. And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.
We must “conserve the freedom of our soul and not mortgage it, except on those rare occasions when we deem it the right path”.
An intellect that does not have a fixed target is as good as lost. Whoever wants to be everywhere is nowhere. No wind blows for him who has no harbour.
It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.
How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time!
But we need to make a distinction: we can love this or that, but we cannot “form a marriage bond” unless it is with our own selves.
The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.
Neither she nor he was the same any more, yet they were searching for each other in a vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black spectres at their feet.
And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.
A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.
Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.