What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,′ the prince said, ’is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous.
She herself had never had enough money and never enough time and hadn’t even been unhappy once, in contrast to those she called refined gentlemen, who always had enough money and enough time and constantly talked about their unhappiness. She.
He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public.
The loser was a born loser, I thought, he has always been the loser and if we observe the people around us carefully we notice that these people consist almost entirely of losers like him, I said to myself, of.
Incredible how rapidly the best relationship, if it is stressed beyond its capacity, wears thin and finally exhausts itself.
When we follow this criminal-justice aspect of our world, and that means of our society, we experience miracles, as they say, on a daily basis.
But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.
One actually finds most people uninteresting, I thought, all the time – almost all the people we meet are uninteresting, having nothing to offer us but their collective mediocrity and their collective imbecility, with which they bore us on every occasion, and so naturally we have no time for them.
One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all.
Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction.
We don’t have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.
For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness... By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people.
We see so much sadness if we care to look.
The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle.
The only advice i can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium.
I want to see him clearly again with the help of these notes, these scraps of memory, which are meant to clarify and recall to mind not only the hopeless situation of my friend but also my own hopelessness at the time, for just as Paul’s life had once again run into an impasse, so mine too had run into an impasse, or rather been driven into one. I am bound to say that, like Paul, I had once more overstated and overrated my existence, that I had exploited it to excess.
I’d always cared extremely little for public opinion because I was always obsessed with my own opinion and hence had no time at all for the public’s.
I’m waiting for the end now, you know! Just as you’re waiting for your end. Just as everyone’s waiting for their end. Only they don’t realize they’re waiting and waiting for what I’ve always been waiting for, namely the end!
The fear of school is the worst fear there is. Most people are ruined by it. If not in childhood, then later on. It’s still possible to die from fear of school at sixty.
But the city doesn’t grab anyone under the arms: on the contrary, it constantly seeks to fend off the unfortunate people who repair to it in search of a career, to destroy them and annihilate them.
Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one.