Sev > Sev's Quotes

“A friendly voice seldom reaches me nowadays. I am alone now, absurdly alone; and in the course of my relentless and underground struggle against everything that human beings till now have revered and loved, I have imperceptibly become something like a lair myself - something hidden away, which people do not find, even if they go out and look for it. But people do not go out in search of such things…”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Like that sky. It's rain and sun both, noon and midnight. ... I think of the lips I've kissed, and of the wretched child I was, and of the madness of life and the ambition that sometimes carries me away. I'm all those things at once. I'm sure there are times when you wouldn't even recognize me. Extreme in misery, excessive in happiness—I can't say it.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Not everyone is an artist but everyone is a fucking critic.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A burnt child loves the fire.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“How difficult it is to be simple!”
― Vincent van Gogh

“I'm a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gentle Spirit

“I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Please — consider me a dream.”
― Franz Kafka

“I don't feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

“Most days I am a museum of things I want to forget.”
― E.E. Scott

“I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.”
― Henri Barbusse

“It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels — his irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself with what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.”
― Albert Camus

“Accept your symptoms, don’t complain of them; immerse yourself in your suffering.”
― Franz Kafka

“It’s just that I belong in the quietest quiet, that’s what’s right for me”
― Franz Kafka

“I’ll shut myself off from everyone to the point of insensibility. Make an enemy of everyone, speak to no one.”
― Franz Kafka

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“One never forgets the taste of certain tears...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I suddenly felt that it was all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought: what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“I’m so pathetically intense. I just can’t be any other way.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963 – A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet's Intimate Correspondence on Marriage and Mental Health

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness