“I see that you think more than you can express. But if that is so, then you also know that you have never lived in experience all that you have thought, and that is not good. Only the thought that we live through in experience has any value. You knew that your ‘world of sanction’ was simply one-half of the world, and yet you tried to suppress the

At that time I found a peculiar refuge—by “chance,” as one says. But really such happenings cannot be attributed to chance. When a person is in need of something, and the necessary happens, this is not due to chance but to himself; his own desire leads him compellingly to the object of which he stands in need.

“I cannot tell you anything, Knauer. People can’t help one another in this case. No one has helped me, either. You must think of something yourself, and you must obey the prompting which really comes from your own nature. There is nothing else. If you cannot find yourself, you won’t find any spirits, either.”

This thought led me to no definite conclusion. A stone had fallen into the well, and the well was my young soul.

He who will fulfill his destiny has neither examples nor ideals, he has nothing dear to him, nothing to comfort him. And one really ought to go this way. People like you and me are certainly very lonely, but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of revolting, of wanting the unusual. But we must drop that, too

Finally I gave up the idea, and began simply to paint a face according to the guidance of my imagination, a face which gradually grew out of the one already begun, as if by itself, at the mercy of color and brush. The result was a face I had dreamed of, and I was not ill pleased with it.

The longing for a full life glowed in me, or rather the longing for love.

I live in my dreams: that is what you have felt about me. Other people live in dreams as well, but not in their own, that is the difference.”

If we were nothing more than individuals, we could actually be put out of the world entirely with a musket-ball, and in that case there would be no more sense in relating stories. But each man is not only himself, he is also the unique, quite special, and in every case the important and remarkable point where the world’s phenomena converge, in a ce