Hermann Broch Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be ...

Hermann Broch

#4. The irrational invalidates any meaning attached to it.

Hermann Broch

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

Hermann Broch

#6. Children have a more restricted and yet a more intense feeling for nature than grown-ups.

Hermann Broch

#7. 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

#8. Any obstacle is an opportunity to gain strength and think differently.

Debasish Mridha

#9. 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

#10. I'm not meek at all.

Paula Radcliffe

#11. Can ye fathom the ocean, dark and deep, where the mighty waves and the grandeur sweep?

Fanny Crosby

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

Hermann Broch

#13. While love ceaselessly strives toward that which lies at the hiddenmost center, hatred only perceives the topmost surface ...

Hermann Broch

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

Hermann Broch

#15. Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system.

Hermann Broch

#16. Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

Hermann Broch

#17. ... 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

#18. In the intoxication of falling, man was prone to believe himself propelled upward.

Hermann Broch

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

Hermann Broch

#20. Do thyself no harm! for we are all here!

Hermann Broch

#21. 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

#22. [P]rogressivism is a top-down, continent-wide tissue of taxes, mandates, and other coercions.

George Will

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

Hermann Broch

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

Hermann Broch

#29. 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

#30. May God redeem mankind.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#31. I had always written but I never took it seriously. It was a way of life, not a living.

Alice Kahn

#32. 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

#33. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

Hermann Broch