The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.

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

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

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.

My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.

What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.