Most people tiptoe their way through life, hoping they make it safely to death.
And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.
Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.
The meaning of life is that it stops.
When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and – in spite of True Romance magazines – we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.
There is no joy for the one who does not bear sadness, there is no sweetness for the one who does not have patience, there is no delight for the one who does not suffer, and there is no relaxation for the one who does not endure fatigue.
I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.
Life is hard. After all, it kills you.
Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.
When hope is gone, time is punishment.
Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralysing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.
There is no growth without change, no change without fear or loss and no loss without pain.
Nothing gold can stay.