“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”

“The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.”

“Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.”

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death”

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”

“People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.”

“Words ruin one's thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one's memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words (are) bringing everything down. Depression derives from words, nothing else.”