A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginning and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.