Great Throughts Treasury

"Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time."

"My aversion from music rests on political grounds."

"Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust or war seemed quite honorable in comparison."

"Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language."

"Never had he lost himself in a book as one does when that single work seems the most important in the world; unique, a little, all-embracing universe, into which one plunges and submerges oneself in order to draw nourishment out of every syllable."

"No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself."

"No, the school has not had a decisive influence on my development. The school of my special plants probably instinctively felt something, but it counted as obstinate incompetence and discarded. A teacher threatened me not by chance, but another student, with the words: I will destroy your career you already On the same day I read in Storm the saying, What can you do to be more, not work-shy and guards, but keep your soul from careerism."

"Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge."

"Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim."

"O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes."

"Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea."

"One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual."

"One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual."

"One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator"

"One ought to go to a funeral instead of to church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make a bad joke."

"Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated."

"Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained."

"Only the exhaustive can be truly interesting."

"Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them"

"Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences."

"Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,.. but it is also good for the disease."

"Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all."

"Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race."

"Passion-means to live for life's sake but I am well aware you Germans live for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget one’s self. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves."

"People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives."

"Politics has been called the art of the possible, and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality."

"Profundity must smile."

"Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward."

"Psycho-analyses, how disgusting."

"Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism."

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

"Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. He never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun."

"Science never makes an advance until philosophy authorizes it to do so."

"Should we bow out and avoid the experience when it is not completely done afterwards to create joy and confidence? Should we 'leave' when life is a bit scary and people feel uneasy or something embarrassing and hurtful? But no, you want to stay, the view should be and bear the, just like there is perhaps something to learn."

"Silence, too, generate things upside down, dysfunctional arrangement, absurd, condemnable."

"Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature."

"Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden."

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."

"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden."

"Some of necessities go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path."

"Some of the men stood talking in this room, and at the right of the door a little knot had formed round a small table, the center of which was the mathematics student, who was eagerly talking. He had made the assertion that one could draw through a given point more than one parallel to a straight line; Frau Hagenström had cried out that this was impossible, and he had gone on to prove it so conclusively that his hearers were constrained to behave as though they understood."

"Sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it’s all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style."

"Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly."

"Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictious word, preserves contact-it is silence which isolates."

"Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it."

"That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life."

"That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every day anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life."

"The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve — confusing the observer and absorbing attention."

"The administration's highest priority over the next seven months is to ward off what now looks like a Democratic victory in the November elections. It's hard to believe his stock has fallen that low with the president. Karl got him re-elected, and Karl was not a champion of war in Iraq."

"The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis."