E. T. A. Hoffmann Quotes

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? - like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?

Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that -- one need merely look out of the window, for example.

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

The birth of a doubt that was once your belief is drowning in the tears that you cry.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

I am a man of lost faiths.

A lot of people say I wouldn't have a down day, but you look at the music and there's real melancholy.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

Revolutionaries were depressed and close to emotional breakdown; after the failure, they left successively.

At some point, I kind of went through this weird existential crisis in high school where I was just really depressed.

Did I pray for death? I did one time. I wanted to die so badly. And I didn't want to die. I wanted to rest, you know. And I knew the only rest I would find is in death.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.