Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

Faith is holding onto uncertainties with passionate conviction.

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.

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement.