The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake,...
The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together.
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss separating Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but alth...
Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well...
Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are s...
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Laughter, on the other hand, Petrarch went on, is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking i...
La insignificancia, amigo mío, es la esencia de la existencia.
La felicidad es el deseo de repetir.
Keep this in mind: it is our religion to praise life. The word life is the king of words. The kingword surrounded by other grand words. The word adventure! The word future! And the word hope! By the...
Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he...
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world.
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes p...