“The sea possesses a power over one’s moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotize. Nature in general can do so.”

Each bird must sing with his own throat.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

Everything that I have written is closely related to something that I have lived through.

Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

Look into any man’s heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

So to conduct one’s life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.

There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney.

It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.

It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.

A forest bird never wants a cage.