Let us see to it that ponderers, thinkers, feelers survive in our midst.

Las naturalezas creativas no son especulativas. Eso las distingue de los imitadores.

I am constructing here a commonsensical book from which nothing at all can be learned. There are, to be sure, persons who wish to extract from books guiding principles for their lives. For this most estimable individual I am therefore, to my gigantic regret, not writing. Is that a pity? Oh yes. O you driest, most upright, virtuous and respectable, kindest, quietest of adventurers- slumber sweetly, for the while.

My life till now seems to have been fairly empty, and the certainty that it will remain empty gives a feeling of endlessness, a feeling which tells one to go to sleep, and to do only the most unavoidable things.

I know this perfectly well, but it was precisely this that I liked – her thinking me silly. Such a peculiar vice: to be secretly pleased to be allowed to observe that one is being slightly robbed.

Wherever poesie can be felt, all poetic touches are superfluous.

To be alone: icy, iron terror, foretaste of the grave, forerunner of unpitying death. Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another’s loneliness strange.

I cannot live and at the same time despise my life. I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life.

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called “the world,” and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another’s loneliness strange.