...the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of a person we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation--a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. |
"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true |
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. |
A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. |
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. |
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue. |
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog |
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins. |
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. |
Books are a narcotic |
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair |
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. |
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 night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall. |
Evil is whatever distracts. |
Evil is whatever distracts. |