Ausgerechnet der Mensch ist unmenschlich.
What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,′ the prince said, ’is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.
The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his mind.
It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost.
The only friends I have are the dead who have bequethed their writings to me – I have no others.
People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.
You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life – a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.
After all, there is nothing but failure.
Everything is what it is, that’s all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it’s only feigned.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.
The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.
You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.
All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.
The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.