People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

In one and the same human being there are cognitions that, however utterly dissimilar they are, yet have one and the same object,so that one can only conclude that there are different subjects in one and the same human being.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.