que ferais-je?

"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."

“To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.”

“My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.”

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

"Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it."

"But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered."

"We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the grief's that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."

"An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being !".
The Judgment.
Father speaking to son.

"There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise, it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return."

"The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty."

"The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how [to] free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times [I'd] rather be torn to pieces than rather it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me."

“There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness"

"..the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us"

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

"If I write not what I speak, I speak not what I think, I think not what I ought to so my writing comes from the deepest darkness."

"...the innocent and the guilty, both executed without distinction in the end.... "

“I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations".

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us...We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.”

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp.... And how I would write! From what depths I would drag it up! Without effort! For extreme concentration known no effort. The trouble is that I might not be able to keep it up for long, and at the first failure... would be bound to end in a grandiose fit of madness."

"There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation."

”My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”

"Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue."

“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".

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."

"If one has the strength to look at things unceasingly, so to speak without blinking, one sees a great deal; but if one falters only once and shuts one's eyes, everything slips away into darkness."

“If I felt in love, I would be in a world in which I could not live."

"God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them".

“Isolation is a way to know ourselves."

"Intercourse with human beings seduces one to self-contemplation"

“Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself,
and at the same time that indestructible something as well as his trust in it may
remain permanently concealed from him.''

“All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue."

"The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other."

"Self-satisfaction will be punished."

"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."

"If I abandon literature, I'll cease existing."

"Someone must have been telling lies about you, because one fine morning, you wake up to find yourself in a completely new village, a different country, and after remembering your unsettling dreams, you discover that behind it all has sat
a modest little crow of a man."

"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins".

"The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc."

“Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”