Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.

Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering... and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.

What is perceptible to one’s mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.

The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.