Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.

I am so fed up and joyless that not only have I nothing to fill my soul, I cannot even conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it - alas, not even the bliss of heaven.

The idea of demonstrating that this unknown something [God] exists, could scarcely suggest itself to Reason. For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.

In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes--in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc., before one is sufficiently naked.

The crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Certainty... lurks at the door of faith and threatens to devour it.

Just as in the great moment of resignation one does not mediate but chooses, now the task is to gain proficiency in repeating the impassioned choice and, existing, to express it in existence.