Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.
I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness.
The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything – and this is the most cruel law – continually gets worse.
I don’t belong to the masses, I’ve been against the masses all my life, and I’m not in favour of dogs.
Seen from across the street, he was like someone to whom the world had long since given notice to quit but who was compelled to stay in it, no longer belonging to it, but unable to leave it.
If we cannot become what we want to become, we resort to another person – inevitably the person closest to us – and make of him what we have been unable to make of ourselves.
But simple people don’t understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer.
Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we’ve locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that’s the truth.
The forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter – that has always been my ideal.
Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don’t want to recognize that we can’t escape ourselves, except in death.
Jede Existenz ist ein Milderungsgrund, geehrter Herr.
We fill our mental strong-room with these great minds and old masters and resort to them at the crucial moment in our lives;.
And you realize that it was not those great minds and not those old masters which kept you alive for decades but that it was this one single person whom you loved more than anyone else.
It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment.
Children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.
Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.
We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.
Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don’t have any other choice, Glenn.
Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously...
On the one hand we can’t be alone, people like us; on the other we can’t stand company. We can’t stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it’s totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.