Elective Affinities Quotes

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Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
We would not say very much in company if we realized how often we misunderstand what others say.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Even people who are entirely strange and indifferent to one another will exchange confidences if they live together for a while, and a certain intimacy is bound to develop.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Beauty is everywhere a very welcome guest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But there are times," said Charlotte, "when it is necessary and an act of friendship to write nothing rather than not to write.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Fortunately a human being can comprehend only a certain degree of unhappiness; anything beyond it destroys him or leaves him cold. There are situations in which fear and hope become one and the same, cancel one another out, and lose themselves in a dark insensateness. How else could we know the people we love best to be in continual danger and yet go on with our daily lives as usual?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Oh, I envy you!" he cried. "You are still nourished by yesterday's alms, but yesterday's happiness no longer nourishes me.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
No one can walk beneath palm trees with impunity, and ideas are sure to change in a land where elephants and tigers are at home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Nothing higher can be accomplished by the epic poet thus interpreting his own time in order to serve the future. (Foreword by Frederick Ungar in Elective Affinities, 1962, Ungar Publishing)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Few people are capable of concerning themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment.
Thomas Bernhard (Old Masters: A Comedy)
It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Schönheit ist überall ein gar willkommener Gast.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
How many new discoveries does not a person make when on some high point he ascends but a single story higher.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities [Illustrated] (With Active Table of Contents))
He remarked as much to Charlotte on his return, and she was inclined to agree with him. 'As life draws us along,' she replied, 'we think we are acting of our own volition, ourselves choosing what we shall do and what we shall enjoy; but when we look more closely we see they are only the intentions and inclinations of the age which we are being compelled to comply with.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
And thus the lovers lie side by side. Peace hovers about their abode, smiling angelic figures (with whom too they have affinity) look down upon them from the vault above, and what a happy moment it will be when one day they awaken again together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
So all in their different fashions pursued their daily lives, thoughtfully or not; everything seemed to be following is usual course, as is the way in monstrously strange circumstances when everything is at stake: we go on with our lives as though nothing were the matter.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Artists and artisans both demonstrate with perfect clarity that a person is least able to appropriate for himself those things which are most peculiarly his. His works leave him as birds do the best in which they were hatched. In this respect an architect's fate is the strangest of all. How often he employs his whole intellect and warmth of feeling in the creation of rooms from which he must exclude himself. Royal halls owe their splendor to him, and he may not share in the enjoyment of their finest effects. In temples he draws the line between himself and the holy of holies; the steps he built to ceremonies that lift up the heady, he may no longer climb; just as the goldsmith worships only from afar the monstrance which he wrought in the fire and set with jewels. With the keys of the palace the architect hands over all it's comforts to the wealthy man, and has not the least part in them. Surely in this way art must little by little grow away from the artist, if the work, like a child provided for, no longer teaches back to touch its father.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
The god of unreflecting drunkenness advised me to take no reading matter at all, or if I absolutely insisted on reading matter, then a little stack of Rasputin would do; Apollo, on the other hand, in his shrewd, sensible way, tried to talk me out of this trip to France altogether, but when he saw that Oskar's mind was made up, insisted on proper baggage; very well, I would have to take the highly respectable yawn that Goethe had yawned so long ago, but for spite, and also because I knew that The Elective Affinities would never solve all my sexual problems, I also took Rasputin and his naked women, naked but for their black stockings. If Apollo strove for harmony and Dionysus for drunkenness and chaos, Oskar was a little demigod whose business it was to harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason. In addition to his mortality, he had one advantage over all the full divinities whose characters and careers had been established in the remote past: Oskar could read what he pleased whereas the gods censored themselves.
Günter Grass (The Tin Drum)
We are never content with portraits of people we know. For that reason I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. We rarely ask the impossible of anyone, but of them we do. They are required to get everybody's relationship with the subject, everybody's affection or dislike, into the picture; and not merely represent their own view of a person but what everybody else's might be too.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
O viață fără iubire, fără vecinătatea celui iubit nu e decât o comédie à tiroirs, o proastă comedie cu sertărașe. Le tragi afară unul după altul și le împingi iarăși la loc, trecând în grabă la celălalt. Tot ce se petrece, fie chiar bun și însemnat, abia dacă se înlănțuie. Trebuie pretutindeni s-o iei de la început și ai vrea pretutindeni să termini.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Amiamo tanto guardare al futuro perché desideriamo volgere a nostro favore, con desideri silenziosi, l'incertezza che in esso si muove.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
E s'abituava a disfarsi di tutto, per non aver più niente da perdere.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Всім, хто займається чимось по-любительськи, більше залежить на тому, аби самому щось робити, ніж аби воно було зроблено.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Al que ve la belleza humana no le puede dañar ningún mal: se siente en consonancia consigo mismo y con el mundo.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
İnsan kalbinde ne taşıyorsa, dünyaya bakınca da onu görür...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Kötülükten kurtulmak isteyen, her zaman ne istediğini bilir; sahip olduğundan daha iyisini isteyen bakarkördür.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Există, fără îndoială, și pe uscat naufragii.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
The year is dying. The wind blows across the stubble and finds there is nothing left for it to shake. Only the red berries on their slender trees still seem to want to remind us of something merrier and the beat of the thresher awakens in us the thought of how much life and nourishment lies hidden in the cut-down ear of corn.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
He no longer derives any pleasure from the work: he wants everything finished now, at once. And for whom? The paths are to be levelled so that Ottilie can walk in comfort, the seats in place so that Ottilie can rest. On the new pavilion too he does what work he can: it is to be got ready for Ottilie's birthday. Eduard's intentions are, like his actions, no longer ruled by moderation. The consciousness of loving and of being loved drives him beyond all bounds. His rooms, his surroundings have all changed, they all look different. He no longer knows his own house. Ottilie's presence consumes everything: he is utterly lost in her, he thinks of nothing else but only her, the voice of conscience no longer reaches him; everything in his nature that had been restrained, held back, now bursts forth, his whole being flows out towards Ottilie.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Am comis amândoi o nebunie, de care îmi dau seama prea bine. Acela care, la o anumită vârstă, vrea să realizeze vechi dorințe și speranțe din tinerețe, se înșală totdeauna, căci fiecare deceniu al omului își are fericirea proprie, speranțele și perspectivele proprii. Vai de omul pe care împrejurările sau iluziile îl fac să anticipeze sau să se întoarcă la trecut. Am comis o nebunie; trebuie ea oare prelungită pe toată viața?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Only from their authors themselves can we receive philoso phical thoughts ; therefore whoever feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the still sanctuary of their works. The principal chapters of any one of these true philosophers will afford a thousand times more insight into their doctrines than the heavy and distorted accounts of them that everyday men produce, who are still for the most part deeply en tangled in the fashionable philosophy of the time, or in the sentiments of their own minds. But it is astonish ing how decidedly the public seizes by preference on these expositions at second-hand. It seems really as if elective affinities were at work here, by virtue of which the common nature is drawn to its like, and therefore will rather hear what a great man has said from one of its own kind. Perhaps this rests on the same principle as that of mutual instruction, according to which children learn best from children.
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation)
She could not help recalling the bustling which had attended Eduard's celebration of her own birthday, she could not help thinking of the newly erected pavilion under whose roof they had promised themselves so much pleasure. The fireworks exploded again before her eyes and in her ears; the lonelier she was, the more she lived in imagination; yet the more she lived in imagination, the more alone she felt. She leaned upon his arm no more, and had no hope of ever being able to lean on it again.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Якщо у щасливому, мирному співжитті родичі, друзі, домочадці більше, ніж потрібно й варто, розмовляють про те, що діється чи має статися, якщо вони знову й знову звітують одне одному про свої наміри, задуми, заняття і, не радячись по-справжньому, усе ж сприймають життя як потребу обмінюватися порадами, то у важливі миті, саме тоді, коли, здавалося б, людина якраз найбільше потребує сторонньої допомоги, підтвердження, якраз тоді кожен починає покладатися тільки на себе, діє на власний розсуд, приховуючи від інших засоби, роблячи спільним надбання допіру вислід, досягнуту мету, доконані обставини.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
Very often, when she had shut herself in her room for the night, Ottilie would kneel in front of the open chest and look at her birthday presents. She had touched none of them. Very often she would hurry out of the house at daybreak, out of the place where she had formerly found all her happiness, into the open, into the country which had formerly had no attraction for her. She would even want to get off the land itself, she would leap into the boat and row to the middle of the great lake, and there she would take out a travel-book and let herself be rocked by the waves and read and dream herself into a far country; and there she would always discover her friend, he would tell her she had always been close to his heart, she would tell him he had always been close to hers.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Elective Affinities)
When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
Laura Poitras I knew as a documentarian, primarily concerned with America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Her film My Country, My Country depicted the 2005 Iraqi national elections that were conducted under (and frustrated by) the US occupation. She had also made The Program, about the NSA cryptanalyst William Binney—who had raised objections through proper channels about TRAILBLAZER, the predecessor of STELLARWIND, only to be accused of leaking classified information, subjected to repeated harassment, and arrested at gunpoint in his home, though never charged. Laura herself had been frequently harassed by the government because of her work, repeatedly detained and interrogated by border agents whenever she traveled in or out of the country. Glenn Greenwald I knew as a civil liberties lawyer turned columnist, initially for Salon—where he was one of the few who wrote about the unclassified version of the NSA IG’s Report back in 2009—and later for the US edition of the Guardian. I liked him because he was skeptical and argumentative, the kind of man who’d fight with the devil, and when the devil wasn’t around fight with himself. Though Ewen MacAskill, of the British edition of the Guardian, and Bart Gellman of the Washington Post would later prove stalwart partners (and patient guides to the journalistic wilderness), I found my earliest affinity with Laura and Glenn, perhaps because they weren’t merely interested in reporting on the IC but had personal stakes in understanding the institution.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
How each sex has its own prejudice about love — Despite all the concessions that I am willing to make to the prejudice in favor of monogamy, I will never admit the claim that man and woman have equal rights in love; these do not exist. For man and woman have different conceptions of love; and it is one of the conditions of love in both sexes that neither sex presupposes the same feeling and the same concept of “love” in the other. What woman means by love is clear enough: total devotion (not mere surrender98) with soul and body, without any consideration or reserve, rather with shame and horror at the thought of a devotion that might be subject to special clauses or conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is a faith; woman has no other faith. Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the presupposition of feminine love. Supposing, however, that there should also be men to whom the desire for total devotion is not alien; well, then they simply are—not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes a slave; while a woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect woman. A woman’s passion in its unconditional renunciation of rights of her own presupposes precisely that on the other side there is no equal pathos, no equal will to renunciation; for if both partners felt impelled by love to renounce themselves, we should then get—I do not know what; perhaps an empty space? Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, wants to be absorbed into the concept of possession, possessed Consequently, she wants someone who takes, who does not give himself or give himself away; on the contrary, he is supposed to become richer in “himself”—through the accretion of strength, happiness, and faith given him by the woman who gives herself. Woman gives herself away, man acquires more—I do not see how one can get around this natural opposition by means of social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is. For love, thought of in its entirety as great and full, is nature, and being nature it is in all eternity something “immoral.” Faithfulness is accordingly included in woman’s love; it follows from the definition. In man, it can easily develop in the wake of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncratic taste and so-called elective affinity; but it is not an essential element of his love—so definitely not that one might almost speak with some justification of a natural counterplay of love and faithfulness in man. For his love consists of wanting to have and not of renunciation and giving away; but wanting to have always comes to an end with having. It is actually man’s more refined and suspicious lust for possession that rarely admits his “having,” and then only late, and thus permits his love to persist. It is even possible for his love to increase after the surrender; he will not readily concede that a woman should have nothing more to give him.—
Friedrich Nietzsche
The people could still have their republic, but much legislative power would be shifted out of an elected body and into the hands of the right sort of people. Rather than narrowly a matter of racism, this has been a transfer of legislative power to the knowledge class – meaning not a class defined in Marxist or other economic terms but those persons whose identity or sense of selfworth centers on their knowledge. More than merely the intelligentsia, this class includes all who are more attached to the authority of knowledge than to the authority of local political communities. Which is not to say that they have been particularly knowledgeable, but that their sense of affinity with cosmopolitan knowledge, rather than local connectedness, has been the foundation of their influence and identity.
Philip Hamburger (The Administrative Threat (Encounter Intelligence Book 3))
Men and women face choices and constraints that differ significantly from those faced by their counterparts in previous eras because of the contradiction between the demands of relationships of any kind (family, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood) and the demands of the workplace for mobile, flexible employees. These choices and constraints are responsible for pulling families apart. Rather than being shaped by the rules, traditions, and rituals of previous eras, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that contemporary family units are experiencing a shift from a “community of need,” where ties and obligations bound us in our intimate lives, to “elective affinities” that are based on choice and personal inclination. In spite of these difficult changes, the lure of the romantic narrative remains strong. In an uncertain society, “stripped of its traditions and scarred by all kinds of risk,” as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim put it, love “will become more important than ever and equally impossible.
Sam Atkinson (The Sociology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained)
​The vital condition of every true state is a well-defined climate: the climate of the highest possible tension, but not of forced agitation. It will be desirable that everyone stay at his post, that he takes pleasure in an activity in conformity with his own nature and vocation, which is therefore free and desired for itself before considering utilitarian purposes and the unhealthy desire to live above one’s proper condition. If it is not possible to ask everyone to follow an ‘ascetic and military vision of life’, it will be possible to aim at a climate of concentrated intensity, of personal life, that will encourage people to prefer a greater margin of liberty, as opposed to comfort and prosperity paid for with the consequent limitation of liberty through the evitable economic and social influences. Autarchy, in the terms we have emphasised, is a valid Fascist formula. A course of virile, measured austerity is also valid and, finally, an internal discipline through which one develops a taste and an anti-bourgeois orientation of life, but no schoolmarmish and impertinent intrusion by what is public into the field of private life. Here, too, the principle should be liberty connected with equal responsibility and, in general, giving prominence to the principles of ‘great morality’ as opposed to the principles of conformist ‘little morality’. A doctrine of the state can only propose values to test the elective affinities and the dominant or latent vocations of a nation. If a people cannot or does not want to acknowledge the values that we have called ‘traditional’, and which define a true Right, it deserves to be left to itself. At most, we can point out to it the illusions and suggestions of which it has been or is the victim, which are due to a general action which has often been systematically organised, and to regressive processes. If not even this leads to a sensible result, this people will suffer the fate that it has created, by making use of its ‘liberty’.​
Julius Evola (Fascism Viewed from the Right)
[T]here is a dangerous re-evaluation and exploitation of the work of Guénon as the inspirer of a "traditionalist" or "spiritualist" reaction to the modern world. They are often nothing other than attempts to manipulate the universal doctrine in order to legitimize certain thinking or power trends that are only interested in the government of this world, and which have no sense of the sacred. These readers of Guénon seem to get lost in fruitless analytic speculation about the crisis of the modern world or about a hypothetical militant revolt against it. So they make the mistake of always looking for evil outside themselves, creating a justification for being better than other people simply because they have read the work of Guénon and because the rest of the world is in chaos. They confuse their contempt for the chaos in the world with their contempt for the world itself, and their contempt for individuality with their contempt for humanity. They forget that humanity and the world are the fruit of God's creation and that, in any phase of a cosmic cycle, the life of every man is necessarily subject to the battle between the forces of good and evil. It is therefore to overcome those illusions of the soul that are a product of that imagination that is so typical of modern man who, not wanting to make the necessary changes to raise himself up spiritually by learning to control his instincts and stifling his own individuality, by a biased interpretation of tradition, tries to drag down the level of the world by disapproving of the decline of modern man in order to congratulate himself on his own supposed superiority. These people, rather than constructively delving into traditional teaching, only drag out arguments from tradition in order to oppose today's aberrations, and inevitably end up being trapped and fall into a form of dualism between good and evil, incapable of understanding the providential nature of the world that will remain like this as long as God allows it to continue to exist to be used for good. The next steps taken by these incurable idealists are usually to build a sand castle or an ivory tower lived in by a group of people romantically banded together by elective affinities or by an unstoppable missionary spirit aimed at forming a traditional society. Both cases are only a parody of the spiritual responsibility of every person on earth who lives in the world with the sincere aspiration to a genuine intellectual elevation, with a balanced awareness of a dimension of the Creation that is both universal and eschatological. On the one hand, we have people trapped like prisoners in a fantasy about the other world who often become theorists about the detachment from this world and, on the other hand, there are the militants of the illusions of this world who create confusion about the reality of the other world. Prisoners and theorists, fantasies, illusions and confusions, are all expressions of how far we are from an authentic traditional and spiritual perspective. But, above all, we must recognize that in some of these poor readers, there is a chronic inability to distinguish and bring together this world and the other world, without confusing them, and therefore cannot really understand the teachings of Shaykh 'Abd al -Wahid Yahya René Guénon and apply them to their lives.
Yahya Pallavicini