Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.
The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.
Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.
The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!
Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in theworld unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.
Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.
Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.
Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.
Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.
There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.
Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.
It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
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