Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.