Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.

After all, there is nothing but failure.

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself.

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can't remember committing, a judicial error probably.