Your spirit has power only when it is given direction; left to its own devices, it would sing itself into despair.
How many people you have seen this week! The five historians from Berlin. The Italian actress from Australia. The young Jew from New York who worships Isaac Babel. The publisher with the most important voice in England. The mother of the deceased Otter woman. The secret hairdresser from the Abruzzi. Veza’s weepy cavalier. The Chinese pianist and his fiancée, the daughter of the famous violinist. Kafka, who came from Frankfurt to ask for the hand of his cousin. It was a lot, it was too much, and yet you were nearly smothered by yourself alone.
Mercy is a flood that destroys him completely.
That which he could lose he casts far off from himself, to keep it in his possession.
To mangle a sentence into a landscape.
For months he didn’t talk even to himself. Now words shoot out of him like knives.
We are hypocrites because we cannot forget the things we have acquired.
I would like once more to be as innocent as if I did not own a single book and hadn’t written one yet.
Every forgotten idea crops up again on the other side of the world.
To have someone happy at home, so you can be happy elsewhere.
Sometimes things get so close that they ignite each other. This illumination, coming from closeness, is what we live for.
You have not even finally settled the few things you have thought about the last thirty years. Everything is all still there. The world is untouched; no one has figured it out. But there is enough within you now to create the world from yourself. You shrink from this because you still doubt your own breadth. “Is it even enough? Isn’t it far too little?”
It is not important to tell oneself one is alone, when that’s all it is. The pose of the solitary thinker makes his existence worthless. As for thinking something just because one is alone in thinking it, not to think it at all is better. One ought not to see oneself as here and the whole worthless world there. One may have to abstain from the world periodically, but this is happiness, not bitterness. Contempt for everyone one does not know, just because one does know some others, is an infallible sign of stupidity, and the worst of our human legacy.
Those things one tries to get to the bottom of disperse into nothingness. This is one danger. But they also become knottier. This is another danger: they become heavier, harder problems.
Learn to speak again at fifty-five, not a new language but speech itself. Discard all my prejudices, even if nothing else is left. Reread the great books whether I’ve actually read them before or not. Listen to people without lecturing them, especially those who have nothing to teach me. Stop validating fear as a means of fulfillment. Struggle against death without constantly pronouncing its name. In short, courage and justice.
Splendid to think that we are steeped in secrets. The nicest thing about learning is that it multiplies the secrets.
Whoever touches power will, unawares, be contaminated by it. He cannot forget it unless he can forget himself.
He cannot shut out loathsome praise; it crawls inside him and reaches his heart.
Uncanny how all the calculations agree, as though the universe arranged itself according to science.
Subjection of the universe to the earth.