We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?
At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?
The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.
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.
The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.
If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
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.
It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.
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.
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
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 sweet, wonderful reward.
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill
There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
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