“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

You misinterpret everything, even the silence.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

They say ignorance is bliss, they’re wrong

You can choose to be free , but it’s last decision you’ll ever make

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

No, said the priest, you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary. Depressing view, said K. The lie made into the rule of the world.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

When the passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity.

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.

If he does not plant the field that was given over to him as a garden, if it be arable land, the gardener shall pay the owner the produce of the field for the years that he let it lie fallow, according to the product of neighboring fields, put the field in arable condition and return it to its owner.

Irony is the glory of slaves.