Love isn't actually a feeling at all--it's an illness, a certain condition of body and soul.... Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will--just like cholera or a fever.

I've become convinced that every person should treat himself strictly and even rudely and distrustfully; it's difficult to tame the beast in oneself.

I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.

Don't force me into saying what I don't want to say, and what I won't say.

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!