They did not know what we can now guess at, contemplating the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence.
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!
From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever.
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.
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.
We need the 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 inside us.
The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.