My “fear” is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Es perfectamente imaginable que el esplendor de la vida está dispuesto, siempre en toda plenitud, alrededor de cada uno, pero cubierto de un velo, en las profundidades, invisible muy lejos. Sin embargo está ahí, no...

Most men are not wicked… They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me...

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Atata timp cat nu incetezi s urci, treptele nu se vOr termina; sub pasii tai care urca, ele se vOr inmulti la nesfarsit

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

She is so distinct to me, it’s as though I had run my hands all over her.

Mientras estaba tendido allí, a un paso de mí yacía un escarabajo, patas arriba, desesperado. No podía enderezarse, me habría gustado ayudarlo, era tan fácil hacerlo, bastaba un paso y un empujoncito para brindarle una...

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to...

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

my heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle,

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into...

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one’s triumph.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of...

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have...

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up...

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing...

It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.

Ja sam kraj ili početak.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all...

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated?…The heroism involved in staying put in spite of it all is the heroism of a cockroach, which also won’t be driven...

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the...

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within...

Please — consider me a dream.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us.

We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have not eaten of the tree of life.

Guilt is never to be doubted.

I only fear danger where I want to fear it.

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.