If Goethe claimed towards the end of his life that every reasonable person is a moderate Liberal, then in our time one must say: Every reasonable per… - Thomas Mann

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.

Das Gute kommt immer zu spät, immer wird es zu spät fertig, wenn man sich nicht mehr recht darüber freuen kann.

Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates through it.