A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject

I have always been an admirer, I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

Whoever loves the more is at a disadvantage and must suffer

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates through it.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.

Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.

Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

One always needs to be reminded; one is by no means always in possession of one’s whole self. Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of unusual clarity and vision do we really know about ourselves.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?

Mere knowledge of human psychology would in itself infallibly make us despondent if we were not cheered and kept alert by the satisfaction of expressing it.

Only death dignifies our sufferings in the eyes of others.

Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the pious formula, into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?