Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life is to blame for everything.
Layer by layer art strips life bare.
One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.
There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.
Don't you know that every perfect life would be the end of art?
Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?
A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage.
If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.
the restricting of intellectual and spiritual needs to the mania of progress
Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.
Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.
[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.
Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.
But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.
It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.
He who is allowed to do as he likes will soon run his head into a brick wall out of sheer frustration.
... the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.
Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.
... there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.
Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
The truth is not a crystal that can be slipped into one's pocket, but an endless current into which one falls headlong.
And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.
A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.
Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.
Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
Mathematics is the source of a wicked intellect that, while making man the lord of the earth, also makes him the slave of the machine.
... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.
All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!
Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.
You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for a single hour.
Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.
Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.
... the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it.
You see how wrong I go, how ridiculous I'm making myself in your eyes by keeping on guessing wrong like this! Doesn't that help you to come out with it? Come on now!
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.
The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.
What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.
The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us.
A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.
...love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.
There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.