To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.

Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.

If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.

My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

All the shrewdness of 'man' seeks one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.