Quote collection
446 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up."
"Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."
"She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance."
"Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day."
"I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions."
"Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap."
"The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation andsecurity. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire."
"I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder."
"The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth."
"What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?"
"He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves."
"There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness."
"Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them."
"I call that man awake who, with conscious knowledge and understanding, can perceive the deep unreasoning powers in his soul, his whole innermost strength, desire and weakness, and knows how to reckon with himself."
"Good that you ask. You should always ask, always have doubts."
"My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had slowly grown to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to the ground."
"So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?"
"He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself."
"...and gradually his face assumed the expressions which are so often found among rich people - the expressions of discontent, of sickliness, of displeasure, of idleness, of lovelessness. Slowly the soul sickness of the rich crept over him."
"Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones."