A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is
unhappy until he can get out of it.
By believing passionately in something that still
does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
From a certain point onward there is no longer
any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time
wanting things.
In the fight between you and the
world, back the world.
It is not necessary that you leave the
house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still
and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other
My peers, lately,
have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs
to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have
as well.
One advantage in
keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
One must not cheat
anyone, not even the world of its victory.
Productivity is
being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
So long as you
have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
How pathetically
scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner
world, as there is of the outer world.
Books are a narcotic.
Paths are made by walking
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience
and Laziness.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into an enormous insect. [JLJ - I hate when that happens.]
The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same
matter do not wholly exclude each other. [JLJ - I think I understand what this means, but then again I am not sure I do.]
"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that
alone doesn't make it true." [JLJ - in addition to being boring and incomprehensible, we must present equations which are
meaningless. We also must generate charts which show data which is pointless. We must then present an argument which is false
and misleading. Finally, we must present a conclusion which is wrong. Once we have done all of this, and only then, are we
correct.]
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! [JLJ - What a fool I am. I had previously assumed that all knowledge,
the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the cat.]
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit
your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
