Amber > Amber's Quotes

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”
― Franz Kafka

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka