We had taken him for a Norwegian ship’s captain and had come to his table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which, indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe.
Weng lies in a hollow, buried among blocks of ice for millions of years. The roadsides favor promiscuity.
People seek the society of others who are exciting, disconcerting and volatile, who are never the same from one moment to the next and usually change complexion completely.
Io non ho mai avuto un padre e non ho mai avuto una madre, ma ho avuto sempre il mio Montaigne.
It’s a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one’s watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it’s an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it.
I enter into a book and settle in it, neck and crop, you should realize, in one or two pages of a philosophical essay as if I were entering a landscape, a piece of nature, a state organism, a detail of the earth, if you like, in order to penetrate into it entirely and not just with half my strength or half-heartedly, in order to explore it and then, having explored it with all the thoroughness at my disposal, drawing conclusions as to the whole.
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.