As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness.
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There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
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Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
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The only religious way to think of death is as a part and parcel of life to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.
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Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
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It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, alrea...
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How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black...
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Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today ...
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The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian ...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject.
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This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.
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I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something I don't know where I would be without it.
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The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
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A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.
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Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
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What was life?
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And thus they sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace o...
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For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence.
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A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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What is uttered is finished and done with.
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My aversion from music rests on political grounds.
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It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
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It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.
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A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
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Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
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All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R.I.P.—requiescat in pace—you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression?...
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If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
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One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
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