The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.

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.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

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.