Alex > Alex's Quotes

“Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting people
off. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.
Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. There
is no getting around it—people are hard to live with.”
― Natsume Sōseki

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
― Franz Kafka

“Dear Milena,
I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
― Franz Kafka, Kafka's Selected Stories: A Norton Critical Edition

“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”
― Franz Kafka, The Castle

“It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet i have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“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

“Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.”
― Franz Kafka