خود بودن، ماجراجویانه است. مانند دیگران بودن، نسخه ی تقلیدی بودن، تبدیل شدن به یک عدد در میان جمعیت، بسیار آسان تر و امن تر است.

انسانى كه در شادى و غم زندگى چنان غرق مى شود كه سراسر عمرش از "نفْس" و "خويشتنِ" خود آگاه نمى شود، زندگى اش به هدر رفته است.

مردم از کنار بزرگ ترین خطر، که همانا از دست دادنِ "خویشتنِ" خود است، چنان بی سر و صدا می گذرند که انگار هیچ اهمیتی ندارد؛ از دست دادنِ هر چیز دیگر، مثل دست و پا، یک پنج دلاری، همسر و غیره، بیشتر مورد توجهشان قرار می گیرد.

I still accept an imperative of knowledge, through which men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what I need to live, a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge

Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom, which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one not of attraction but of repulsion.

He who is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility… When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently…

Come, sleep and death; you promise nothing, you hold everything.

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

Our age reminds one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: Everything goes on as usual and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gives it validity, no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic--tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.