Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend in a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment when in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
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.
I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
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.
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
