There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth.
I want now to be of today. It is painful to be conscious of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness.
You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.
Men are most powerfully affected by those evils which themselves feel, or which appear before their own eyes.
The more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed, Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.
And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
All knowledge hurts.
We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge - especially if the knowledge is terrible.
I think he's beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.
As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things
