You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Evil is whatever distracts.
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.
One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.
Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.
My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.
The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.
Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.
Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
Dread of night. Dread of not-night.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
