When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumber...
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go...
Y lo que, por el contrario, me sucede a mí en las raras horas de placer, lo que para mí es delicia, suceso, elevación y éxtasis, eso no lo conoce, ni lo ama, ni lo busca el mundo más que si acaso en las novelas; en la vida, lo considera una locu...
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.
In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.
La seriedad (...) se produce por una hiperestimación del tiempo. (...) En la eternidad, sin embargo, no hay tiempo: la eternidad es solo un instante, lo suficientemente largo para una broma.
Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surpr...
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing i...
For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artl...
In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.
What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.
How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of...
You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.
... it would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with blind obsession for new war.
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I have attained it.