Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.
For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.
Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.
We are happy when people/things conform and unhappy when they don’t. People and events don’t disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.
Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child’s need for sleep.
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel,1918)
A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.
But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.
Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings – they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them.
That…that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting…but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance.
In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.