Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter—no matter how unsuited and unprepared—to a life of revenge. I

Perhaps the measure of the best art is that it does not excite envy.

Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.

If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?

American’s capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.

I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF

The Anti-Semiten. Why don’t they ever learn? Why does God permit it?” Roth sneered. “God is a luxury I don’t give myself.

Listen my love the hour is late my side has an ache If you don't get a taxi my heart will break

You know,” he laughed easily, “with all the goddam drinkin’ Ah’ve done, Ah still can’t remember the taste of it unless Ah got the bottle right with me.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Where are we really going? Always home.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.

Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming.

One should, when overwhelmed by the shadow of a giant, move aside and see if the colossal shadow isn't merely that of a pygmy blocking out the sun.

Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.

Humanity is a comic role.

To philosophize means to make vivid.

Knowledge is only one half. Faith is the other.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

Philosophy is really homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere.

Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.

But even more heavenly than the flashing stars are those infinite eyes which the night opens within us, and which see further even than the palest of those innumerable hosts.

There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.

And now I awaken, for I am both yours and mine.

Longing for Death Down into the womb of the earth, Out of the kingdom of light, Anger, pain, and a savage blow Signal the happy departure.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

Whoever sees life other than as a self-destroying illusion is himself still preoccupied with life. Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

What delights, what pleasures does your life offer you that outweigh the raptures of death?

Our body is a moulded river

The process of history is combustion.

Everything is seed.

The greatest of sorcerers would be the one who would cast a spell on himself to the degree of taking his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Might that not be our case?

Up to now our thinking was either purely mechanical - discursive - atomistic - or purely intuitive - dynamic. Perhaps now the time for union has come?

Light had its allotted time; but timeless and infinite is the reign of the night − the duration of sleep eternal.

I show that I have understood a writer only when I can act in his spirit, when, without constricting his individuality, I can translate him and change him in diverse ways.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete

Ohne die Tr ume w rden wir gewiss fr her alt.

The most intimate community of all knowledge—the republic of learning is the high purpose of scholars.

Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.

Apparently, we go forward.