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

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.

I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.

I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.

It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.

The limited circle is pure.

All language is but a poor translation.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.

It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’ ‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.

Evil is whatever distracts.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

I just got one last thing, I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have. To spend each day with some laughter and some thought, to get you’re emotions going.

Some of the greatest moments in life come from moments that are incomplete.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters – because we never know which things might.

Once in one’s life, for one mortal moment, one must make a grab for immortality; if not, one has not lived.

The moment we begin to celebrate ourselves and focus on our successes is the moment we begin living.

I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.

I expect some new phases of life this summer, and shall try to get the honey from each moment.