“The meaning of life is that it stops.”

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.

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

I’m thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

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.

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.

In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.

They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

First impressions are always unreliable.

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

I hear her bite is deadly! Be careful ladies and gentlemen.

If you’re afraid to die you won’t be able to live.

We always honor our people when they die; we’ve got to honor them while we’re still alive.

Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can’t nail them to a wall.

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

I said to myself, ‘I want to die decently’.

Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.