Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.
Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Once you label me you negate me.
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
Be that self which one truly is.
I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
