“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

When asked, “Why do you always wear black?”, he said, “I am mourning for my life.

Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.

Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.

You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.

Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read – my own or other people’s works – it all seems to me not short enough.

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

No matter how often you knock at nature’s door, she won’t answer in words you can understand–for Nature is dumb. She’ll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn’t expect a song.

And you loved me like I was, and had always been, the answer and the question did not, and would never, matter.

As there was never any question there was never any answer.

Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.