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Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.
the chance circumstances of his life and the direction it had taken were dictated by his instincts, in his case inertia and detachment.
know myself only as a symphony.
All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.
free me from religion because it is gentle and from unbelief because it is strong.
You are always the landscape I was just about to glimpse, the hem of a dress I did not quite see, lost in an eternal Now that lies just around the corner.
If only I could create a New Way of Looking with which to see you, as well as New Thoughts and New Feelings with which to think and feel you!
I am a well of gestures never made, of words never thought or spoken, of dreams I forgot to dream until the end.
Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief.
Should we reason our way out of sadness? But why, when reasoning requires effort? And the sad man lacks the necessary energy to make any effort at all.
How often it pains me not to be the captain of that ship, the driver of that train! To be some other banal individual whose life, because not mine, fills me with delicious longing and a poetic sense of otherness!
As a man of ideals, perhaps my greatest aspiration really does not go beyond occupying this chair at this table in this café.
Weavers of despair, let us weave only shrouds — white shrouds for the dreams we never dreamed, black shrouds for the days when we die, gray shrouds for the gestures we only dreamed of, imperial purple shrouds for our futile feelings.
Life pursues me like a shadow. And a shadow only ceases to exist when there is no shade. Life only ceases to pursue us when we surrender to it.
Life gets in the way of being able to express life. If I were to experience a great love, I would never be able to describe it.
Other people’s understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.
Anyone who wants to be understood will never know the delight of being understood, because this happens only to the complex and misunderstood; simple souls, the ones whom other people can understand, never feel a desire to be understood.
Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless. Why is life ugly? Because it is all aims and purposes and intentions.
And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future.
Like happiness, the day was taking a long time to arrive, and at that hour, it felt as if it never would.
To love is merely to grow tired of being alone: it is therefore both cowardly and a betrayal of ourselves. (It is vitally important that we should not love.)
To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person’s God-given ability to make mistakes.
