War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.
Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world,...
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.
Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals wh...
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
If you are possessed by an idea you find it expressed everywhere you even smell it.