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

Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.

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.

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.

One man is an oppressor because many are slaves; let us despise the slaves.

We are all born free and spend a lifetime becoming slaves to our own false truths.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

Alexander the Great found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained,I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

Don’t be a slave to modern vices, Chasing false merit, distraction untoward. Take time for yourself, to be alone with your thoughts. Imagination the real reward.