"Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire t destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure."

"After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs!"

"The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable."

"Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner."

"The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude."

"Forewarned is forearmed."

"Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate."

"Intellectuals will still go on emphasizing free will even when they’ve got nothing left to eat."

"Don’t start anything you can’t finish."

"The rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all."

"When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach."

"Time stands still for man and woman alike, it is a good moment, because Time usually makes everything worse, poor people grow old, rich people can buy a little time but they can'hold it up for good, it always catches up with them. In the last analysis, Time is democratic."

"The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions."

"Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa."

"Work is not a constraint.Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however,can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave."

"For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better."

"Der Sensible muß verbrennen, dieser zarte Nachtfalter."

"First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk."

"Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end."

"We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils."

"The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates."

"For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for."

"Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place."

"Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back."

"Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted."

"There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist."

"Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in."

"I have a feeling that you despise your body and that you only value art, you only value your argent needs, but eating and sleeping aren’t enough. You believe that your appearance is your enemy, and the only friend you have is music. Why look just in the mirror, look at your reflection, you’ll never find a better friend that yourself."

"The main thing:... not to let myself be defined by history, not to take it as an excuse—despise it in those who hide their personal insignificance behind it—and yet know it, in order to understand people and above all to see through them (my hatred of history as a refuge for be-nothings)."

"My way of thinking is often so wrong, so untenable, because I think as if I were talking to someone else."

"I was angry at her for not being what I wanted."

"Ich hörte auf, oberflächlich zu sein — ich dachte nichts mehr"

"I imagine that even the initiated experiences these views and insights as an outsider pressed against panes of glass: for Trakl's experience occurs like mirror images and fills its entire space, which, like the space in the mirror, cannot be entered."

"A fine thing: suddenly to forget about one’s history, one’s past, to stop feeling that one’s present happiness is endangered by what one used to be."

"Tense, unnerved, and close to madness before writing—and when I read what I’ve written it looks so calm."

"In the evening you hear the scream of bats,"

"The murderer smiles palely in wine, Death's horror grips the sick. Excoriated and naked, the nun prays Before the Savior's agony on the cross. The mother sings quietly in sleep. Peacefully the child looks into the night With eyes that are completely truthful. In the whorehouse laughter rings. By candlelight down in the cellar hole The dead one paints with white hand A grinning silence on the wall. The sleeper whispers still."

"The black snow that runs from the rooftops;"

"Nur dem, der Glück verachtet, wird Erkenntnis."

"Man wird immer ärmer, je reicher man wird."

"Er ist wohl kein Opfer des Krieges. Es war mir immer unbegreiflich, daß er leben konnte. Sein Irrsinn rang mit göttlichen Dingen [...]."

"Proud of my near-madness, as if I had attained a goal."

"Daz si da heizent minne, Deis niewan senede leit."

"Liebe machet schoene wîp: desn mac diu schoene niht getuon, sin machet niemer lieben lîp."