Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
All lives end, but not all conclude.
It is not what happens to me that makes me great, but what I do.
If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety. Since he is both beast and angel, he can be in anxiety, and the greater the anxiety, the greater the man.
Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.
One must see it close up, the callousness with which otherwise kind people act in the capacity of the public because their participation or non-participation seems to them a trifle – a trifle that with the contributions of the many becomes the monster.
Twaddle, rubbish, and gossip is what people want, not action... The secret of life is to chatter freely about all one wishes to do and how one is always being prevented – and then do nothing.
One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter... because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked.
The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short he does not write in order that.
There are two ways to be fooled: one is to believe what isn’t true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Another translation says:”There are two ways to be fooled: one is to believe what isn’t so; the other is to refuse to believe what is so.
Woman is the conscience of man.
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it.
The great can never do harm when grasped in their greatness.
Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it.
Only the Eternal is always appropriate and always present, is always true. Only the Eternal applies to each human being, whatever his age may be.
Deepest within every person there is nonetheless an anxiety about being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household.
I am a fork, and I will stick you!
Passion excites, earthly wisdom cools, but neither this heat nor this coolness, nor the blending of the heat and coolness is the pure air of the eternal. There is in this heat something ardent, and in this coolness something sharp, and in the blending of the two something indefinite, or an unconscious deceitfulness, as in the hazardous season of spring. But this ‘thou shalt love’ takes away all the unsoundness and preserves the soundness of eternity.
What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.
That in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.
The good is by virtue my willing it. Otherwise it has no existence.