Doctor Glas
Hjalmar Söderberg
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We know so little about one another. We embrace a shadow and love a dream.”
“We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.”
“A pregnant woman is a frightful object. A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood.”
“Nothing so reduces and drags down a human being as the consciousness of not being loved.”
“Thought is an acid, eating us away. At first we imagine it will only eat into that which is rotten and sick and must be removed. But thought thinks otherwise. It eats blindly. It begins with the prey you most gladly throw to it - but don't imagine it will be content with that! It doesn't stop until it has gnawed away the last thing you hold dear.”
“We want everything, we want to be everything. We want to experience all the joys of good fortune and the full depths of suffering. We want the excitement of action and the calm of observation. We want the silence of the desert as well as the noise of the forum. Simultaneously we want to be the hermit´s thought and the voice of the people; we want to be both melody and harmony. Simultaneously! How could this be possible?”
“There are people who have no talent for happiness and who know this with painful, implacable clarity. Such people don’t seek happiness, merely to bring some sort of form and style to their unhappiness.”
“Nothing diminishes and degrades a human being more than the knowledge of being unloved.”
“I’ve borne my isolation with me through the crowd as the snail bears its house. For some people isolation isn’t a circumstance in which they find themselves, it’s an innate characteristic.”
“In the days when I was ambitious I worked out a very pretty little plan for conquering the whole earth and rearranging things as they ought to be; and when, in the end, everything became so good it almost began to be boring, then I was going to stuff my pockets with as much money as I could lay hands on and creep away, vanish in some cosmopolis and sit at a corner cafe and drink absinthe and enjoy seeing how everything went to the devil as soon as I wasn't on the scene any more.”
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Book Keywords:
perception, antinatalism, happiness, love, global-domination, isolation, relationships, introversion, ambition, absinthe, we-want
