55 Quotes by Hermann Broch

Political indifference is closely linked to ethical depravity.

… 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.

This was both startling and comforting, and when the eye combined these separate things into a unity so strange, past all disjoining, one was curiously reminded of something, transposed into some mode that lay beyond convention far back in childhood, and the unsolved riddle was like a sign that had emerged from the sea of memory.

Incapable of communicating himself to others, incapable of breaking out of his isolation, doomed to remain the mere actor of his life, the deputy of his own ego—all that any human being can know of another is a mere symbol, a symbol of an ego that remains beyond our grasp, possessing no more value than that of a symbol; and all that can be told is the symbol of a symbol, a symbol at a second, third, nth remove, asking for representation in the true double sense of the word.

Young man, until you know that all names are false you know nothing; not even the clothes on your body are what they seem to be.

No one can see another in the darkness, Esch, and that cloudless clarity of yours is only a dream. You know that I cannot keep you beside me, much as you fear your loneliness. We are a lost generation. I too can only go about my business.

The ultimate justification of mathematics lies beyond mathematics and yet in it; the divine end of Being lies beyond Love and yet is Love--oh, shining spouse, oh dark death, strange confusion of spheres.

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

En el techo de la alcoba había una mancha que parecía una mariposa negra, pero era simplemente suciedad.