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.
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor.
If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called “success” with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can’t reciprocate her feelings.
The sight of a wedding always has a disturbing effect on young girls; at such moments a mysterious sense of solidarity with their own sex takes possession of them.
On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.