Had I to carve an inscription on my tombstone I would ask for none other than “The Individual

Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forward.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more...

The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking, live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more,...

A strange thing happened to me in my dream. I was rapt into the Seventh Heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation I was granted the favor to have one wish....

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

One can advise comfortably from a safe port.

For I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought

The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the...

Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes–and your enemy looks just...

Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.

What our age lacks is not reflection, but passion.

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s...

People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a...

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to...

I shall be your poet! I do not want to be a poet for others; make your appearance, and I shall be your poet. I shall eat my own poem, and that will be my...

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never

Philosophy is life’s dry-nurse, who can take care of us — but not suckle us.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, no error, no crime is so absolutely repugnant to God as everything which is official; and why? because the official is so impersonal and therefore the deepest insult which can be offered...

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the System, if only I can manage to set eyes on it. Hitherto I have had no success; and though...

With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent—and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we...

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes.

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The...

No woman in maternity confinement can have stranger and more impatient wishes than I have.

Now she has power and passion and the struggle has significance for me-let the momentary consequences be what they may. Suppose that in her pride she becomes giddy, suppose that she does break with me-all...

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what...

To the frivolous, Christianity is certainly not glad tidings, for it wishes first of all to make them serious

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is ‘to a certain degree’.

By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense...

They were not unfortunate girls who, as outcasts or in the belief that they were cast out by society, grieved wholesomely and intensely and, once in a while at times when the heart was too...

A great man is one that can develop convictions in solitude and carry them out in a crowd.

Be that self which one truly is.

What kind of power is it that dares intrude between me and my bride, the bride I myself have chosen and who has chosen me? And this power would command her to be true to...

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

It is comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it is comic that Don Juan...

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And...

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if...

Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

So now begins the first war with Cordelia’ in which I retreat and thereby teach her to be victorious as she pursues me. I continually fall back, and in this backward movement I teach her...

a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.