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

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

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

Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

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.