I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.