“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

“To dare is to momentarily lose one’s footing. But not to dare is to lose one’s self.”

“It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion”

“It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.”

“Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.”

“Christian heroism, and indeed one perhaps sees little enough of that, is to risk unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability”

“He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler”