I don’t belong to the masses, I’ve been against the masses all my life, and I’m not in favour of dogs.

The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the...

No he tenido las ilusiones de mi abuelo, pero no he evitado los mismos errores que él. El mundo no es tan importante como él creía, y todo lo que hay en él no tiene...

Träume und Märchen waren ihr eigentlicher Lebensinhalt, dachte ich jetzt. Deshalb hat sie sich auch umgebracht, dachte ich, weil ein Mensch, der nur Träume und Märchen sich zu seinem Lebensinhalt gemacht hat, in dieser Welt...

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to...

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

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so...

In die Natur hineingehen und in dieser Natur ein- und ausatmen und in dieser Natur nichts als tatsächlich und für immer Zuhause zu sein, das empfände er als das höchste Glück. In den Wald gehen,...

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

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...

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

Wir können uns einreden, dass wir mit einem Buch nicht allein sind, wie wir uns einreden können, dass wir mit einem Menschen nicht allein sind.

Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it’s original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all,...

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost.

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even...

We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money….

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.

You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life– a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.