Цитаты из книги «Книга непокоя», страница 21

May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.

The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.

The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire. We all need certain basic things for life’s preservation and continuance; we all desire a more perfect life, complete happiness, the fulfilment of our dreams and .....It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could actually be obtained.‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too.’Whether in the base realm of politics or in the private sanctuary of each man’s soul, the malady is the same.

Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what’s natural. Whatever I’ve enjoyed in these vast fields I’ve enjoyed because I don’t live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.

I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box – but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?

I’ll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.

There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.

...for me each new conviction means another lost illusion.I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.