Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

Vuole credere lei che sarei orgoglioso e felice di possedere un amico tra gli uomini? Ma fino ad ora ho avuto amici solo tra demoni, farfarelli, mostri oscuri e fantasmi afasiaci, vale a dire: tra...

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward,...

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone...

… sentia a dist ncia que o separava dela, pois seu modo de falar não era o dela. E mesmo assim era feliz, pois a felicidade, dizia para si mesmo, não é ser amado; isto...

Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the...

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state … Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air...

A felicidade é amar e talvez colher pequenas aproximações ilusórias da pessoa amada.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.

Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and,...

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature.”A gift of life,” I responded, “if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge...

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the...

Gledajući sve to, razmišljao je kako onaj koji kopnom dolazi u Veneciju na kolodvor ima osjećaj da ulazi u palaču na stražnji ulaz, i da ne valja nikako drukčije dolaziti nego samo ovako kao on...

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the...

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without...

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an...

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of...

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

Democracy is eternal and human. It dignifies the human being; it respects humanity.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

The perishableness of life…imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer’s fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world’s eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and...

rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Wahrscheinlich kann man vom Nichtwollen seelisch nicht leben; eine Sache nicht tun wollen, das ist auf Dauer kein Lebensinhalt.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

La barbarie n est le contraire de la culture que dans le cadre de la hierarchie de pensee que celle-ci nous propose.

Pour qu’un produit majeur de l’esprit soit capable d’avoir aussitôt un effet vaste et profond, il faut qu’une affinité secrète, qu’un accord même existe entre le destin personnel de son auteur et celui, général, de...

But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect....

Der Sommer hat angefangen und schon neigt er sich dem Ende zu.

The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however – it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic than usual at least, expressed a gentle satisfaction at death’s impartiality.

Also Ruhe, Geduld, Mannszucht, messen, essen, liegen, abwarten und Tee trinken.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.

For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for...

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand...

Yet each, in itself—this was the uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all—each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was...

Yet there was a momentary hint of blue sky, and even this bit of light was enough to release a flash of diamonds across the wide landscape, so oddly disfigured by its snowy adventure. Usually...

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it...

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.