Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.

And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.

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.

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.