"I had no motives, no incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial… How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals—and now this! How had the paralysis crept over me so slowly and furtively, this hatred against myself and everybody, this deep-seated anger and obstruction of all feelings, this filthy hell of emptiness and despair?"

"I cool with the snow my burning jowl,
And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear."

"Man disavows, and Deity disowns me.
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me…"

"I bore a hell within me which nothing could extinguish."

"

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape. But enough of that.

Man is miserable, the soul is weak, there are men who will always destroy themselves. It matters little how they do it; this is not the business of society.

"

"I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this—I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain."

"Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell."

"Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell."