Living stoically--I cannot. I have already looked over there, on the other side. The stoics say: everything ends--wait quietly, and don’t...

I must work, without end, towards feeling whatever it is in myself that constitutes unity. And if I give up, I should be carried by the...

There are times when I live entirely without self-consciousness, times when I live all but without mind. I vegetate. I listen to myself,...

A protracted ebbing.* Everything revolves around the one: how can one live on their own grave? You cannot break the chains of sin/the...

It’s fall. Heavy droplets drip sad and terminal--it seems this rain will be eternal.* That’s sentimental. There is no fall--for me. I...

I am pessimistic, and that is something fundamentally base--one must not be pessimistic; only base natures of know not of joy. Is not...

I am weak, and my life is unneeded. But I want to believe: work is waiting for me. True, it’s black work--but it is work for Yiddish...

I don’t experience moods. Moods are lies. No, they are true, my truth, but a truth I do not want.* It’s depressing outside. Already...

There is a great deal of petty evil in me. I choke it, and it chokes me.* It breaks out from time to time. Only from time to time? What...

There is a higher ethics and a lower one: one is the ethics of life, the other is that of the monastery. Someone lives with everything,...

I am immoral, in and of myself. A clear sign of this is that I have no memory. The moral character remembers everything, and he is either...

I have a tendency to lie, and every form in which this tendency manifests itself is tethered to something base. As I have instructed:...

Yes, I was so close to hysteria. It only lasted a few minutes, I suppose. I felt emptied, and the more time passed--the stronger the...

August 15 “Darkness there and nothing more.” A fine pearl of the 19th century.* This is just declamation, the search for affective words,...

It is immoral to live an unselfconscious life. It is not permitted for one’s life to be determined by the blind forces of inheritance,...

I am sleepy, tired. I want nothing. Just forgetting. Just sleep. Sloth has embraced me; her arms are soft, yet cold and slippery. I look...

Can I want? If a person truly wants something, this thing and not something else--they achieve it. But do I want? What do I want? A...

The sense of my life--for every life must have a sense--is to bear my own soul, that coward, which God gave to me, until the end of my...

A human lives only in truth, and by reason of truth. Truth is the great mystery of life: nothing becomes something, from shadow--reality....

Moyshe Varshe was born in the small Lithuanian shtetl Antopol.* When he was a child, his parents moved to Plotsk. It was in that quiet,...