Hermann Broch Quotes & Sayings

In the intoxication of falling, man was prone to believe himself propelled upward. — Hermann Broch

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part. — Hermann Broch

... for overstrong was the command to hold fast to each smallest particle of time, to the smallest particle of every circumstance, and to embody all of them in memory as if they could be preserved in memory through all deaths for all times. — Hermann Broch

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be ... — Hermann Broch

What's important is promising something to the people, not actually keeping those promises. The people have always lived on hope alone. — Hermann Broch

If the embodiment of the fundamental idea of our age were to be found in Victorian architecture, in the Church of Cristo Re in Rome or the Church in Brasilia, in Moscow University or the Capitol in Washington, then our age would undoubtedly be called the 'age of kitsch.' — Hermann Broch

It is almost a matter of no account how far Marguerite will penetrate, whether she will ever be brought back or whether she will fall a prey to some wandering tramp - the sleepwalking of the infinite has seized upon her and never more will let her go. — Hermann Broch

IN the year 1888 Herr von Pasenow was seventy, and there were people who felt an extraordinary and inexplicable repulsion when they saw him coming towards them in the streets of Berlin, indeed, who in their dislike of him actually maintained that he must be an evil old man. Small, but well — Hermann Broch

Do thyself no harm! for we are all here! — Hermann Broch

While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface ... — Hermann Broch

The irrational invalidates any meaning attached to it. — Hermann Broch

You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch. — Hermann Broch

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful." — Hermann Broch

The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch. — Hermann Broch

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves. — Hermann Broch

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism. — Hermann Broch

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad? — Hermann Broch

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness. — Hermann Broch

One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head. — Hermann Broch

Children have a more restricted and yet a more intense feeling for nature than grown-ups. — Hermann Broch

The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system. — Hermann Broch

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing. — Hermann Broch

It is as if Protestantism by clinging to the Scripture wished to preserve the last faint echoes of God's Word in a world that has fallen silent, a world where only things speak dumbly, a world delivered over to the silence and ruthlessness of the Absolute, - and in his fear of God the Protestant has realized that it is his own goal before which he cowers. For in excluding all other values, in casting himself in the last resort on an autonomous religious experience, he has assumed a final abstraction of a logical rigour that urges him unambiguously to strip all sensory trappings from his faith, to empty it of all content but the naked Absolute, retaining nothing but the pure form, the pure, empty and neutral form of a 'religion in itself', a 'mysticism in itself'. — Hermann Broch

The man who is thus outside the confines of every value-combination, and has become the exclusive representative of an individual value, is metaphysically an outcast, for his autonomy presupposes the resolution and disintegration of all system into its individual elements; such a man is liberated from values and from style, and can be influenced only by the irrational. — Hermann Broch

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system. — Hermann Broch

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical — Hermann Broch

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality. — Hermann Broch

The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason. — Hermann Broch

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them — Hermann Broch

As she wanders along the river like this, one hand on her hip and the other clutching a mark to defray her expenses, she is in well-known country. — Hermann Broch