₊ ˚ nico ࿓ ✧ > ₊ ˚ nico ࿓ ✧'s Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Sì: vi sono alcuni che necessariamente smarriscono la strada, poiché per loro non esiste una strada giusta.”
― Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

“Es gibt immer einen Punkt dabei, wo man nicht mehr weiß, ob man lügt oder ob das, was man erfunden hat, wahrer ist als man selber.”
― Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless

“I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.”
― Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger / Mario und der Zauberer

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
― Franz Kafka

“I had made my mind up to stay at the top of the class and […] graduate at the head of it. […] that was my kind of ideal. I just didn't know any better.”
― Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

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

“Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.”
― Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier

“When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.”
― Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel

“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Denn das Glück, sagte er sich, ist nicht, geliebt zu werden; das ist mit Ekel gemischte Genugtuung für die Eitelkeit. Das Glück ist, zu lieben und vielleicht kleine, trügerische Annäherungen an den geliebten Gegenstand zu erhaschen.”
― Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger / Mario und der Zauberer

“And so gentlemen, I learned. Oh, if you have to learn, you learn; if you’re desperate for a way out, you learn; you learn pitilessly. You stand over yourself with a whip in your hand; if there’s the least resistance, you lash yourself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“[He] used to be so insignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“Nobody reaches through here, least of all with a message from one who is dead. You, however, sit at your window and dream of the message when evening comes.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“Like a dog!" he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“E’ per questo che, in fondo al cuore, mi considero un fallito. Non che questo importi molto. Sub specie aeternitatis tutti noi, senza eccezioni, siamo dei falliti. Non ricordo più dove ho letto che “la morte intacca la nostra fiducia nella vita mostrandoci che in fin dei conti tutto è ugualmente futile se visto in rapporto alle tenebre che ci attendono.” Sì, “futile” è la parola esatta. Eppure non posso lamentarmi: ho più amici che nemici e ci sono momenti in cui sono quasi felice di essere al mondo – quando guardo il sole che tramonta e la luna che spunta, o vedo la neve sulla cima della montagna.”
― Fred Uhlman, L'amico ritrovato

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front