I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time,...
I was an unusual young man then, around eighteen years old - precocious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in a hundred other ways. When I compared myself to other people my age, as I...
I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as 'Dear Sir' and 'Under the Circumstances'. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.
I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them wit...
I saw these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no af...
I saw that he was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain.I saw at the...
I have never seen a man look and smile, sit and walk like that, he thought. I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike an...
I had made my mind up to stay at the top of the class and [...] graduate at the head of it. […] that was my kind of ideal. I just didn't know any better.
I am not going anywhere. I am only on my way.
Here it is Saturday. You wouldn't know how good it feels after a hard week.Oh, I can imagine, said Knulp with a smile.
He waited, listening with deep enjoyment, for the end of the sonata. In the still, twilit corridor it sounded so lonely and unworldly, and so brave and innocent also, both childlike and superior, as a...
He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment!
He saw mankind going through life in a childlike or animallike manner, which he loved and also despised at the same time. He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of thi...
He loved that anxiety, that terrible and oppressive anxiety which he experienced during the game of dice, during the suspense of high stakes.
He lost himself a thousand times and for days one end he dwelt in nonbeing. But although the paths took him away from self, in the end they always led back to it
Hewas taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all,he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart,with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a...
Govorim to ozbiljno. Nije naš zadatak da se približimo jedan drugom, kao što se ne sastaju ni sunce ni mesec, ni more ni kopno. Nas dvojca smo, prijatelju dragi, sunce i mesec, mi smo more i kopno. Na...
For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing...
For a long time, he pondered his transformation, listened to the bird, as it sang for joy. Had not this bird died in him, had he not felt its death? No, something else from within him had died, someth...
Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger tha...