Heaping glowing coals on another person's head is usually misunderstood and comes to nothing because the other person knows just as well that he is in the right and has also given some thought on his own part to heaping coals.

The real question is: How much truth can I stand?

Human existence basically is──a never to be completed imperfect tense.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

Mothers easily become jealous of their sons' friends when they are particularly successful. As a rule a mother loves herself in her son more than she does the son himself.

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.