A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.
He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject
I have always been an admirer, I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
