I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.

Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.