Franz Werfel Quotes

Which road, which road did you take That brought you here at last? No road, no road did I take. I leaped, I leaped from dream to dream.

We belong far less to where we've come from than where we want to go.

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.

The old sporadic fanaticism of religious hatred had been skillfully perverted into the cold, steady fanaticism of national hate.

We belong far less to where we’ve come from than where we want to go. —FRANZ WERFEL

. . . failure is also the stern parent of truth. (p525)

There’s a wonderful line in The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel: “For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.

Every man and every nation at one time or other becomes the weak. That's why nobody should tolerate persecution, let alone extermination, as a precedent. (p581)

Everything in this world is primarily a matter of morals, and only very much later one of politics.

Non poteva essere altrimenti. Il mondo non aveva consistenza, poiché era formato della cenere di astri bruciati.

Could the cosmos possibly have a face with a horribly receding forehead and with cannibalistic jaws?

Эта книга была написана в 1933 году. Она была одним из первых выстрелов, одним из первых предупреждений и самой Германии и всему человечеству о появлении реального фашизма во всей его омерзительной, кровавой сущности.

La ragion di Stato non si è mai curata di gettare una graziosa volta fra causa ed effetto. La coscienza del mondo, tanto più pigra a pensare quanto più carica di rimorsi, la stampa dei gruppi momentaneamente al potere e il cervello dei suoi lettori castrato da essa, hanno sempre girato e capito la cosa solo come occorreva a loro

For many people it is depressing even to move house. A lost fragment of life always remains. To move to another town, settle in a foreign country, is for everyone a major decision. But, to be suddenly driven forth, within twenty-four hours, from one's home, one's work, the reward of years of steady industry. To become a helpless prey of help. To be sent defenceless out to Asiatic highroads, with several thousand miles of dust, stones, and morass before one. To know that one will never again find a decently human habitation, never again sit down to a proper table. Yet this is all nothing. To be more shackled than any convict. To be counted as outside the law, a vagabond, whom anyone has the right to kill unpunished.

An old proverb says: “Veritas vincit,” truth is victorious. Unfortunately this adage is an idealistic overestimate and misjudges life’s realities. By the end of the days of mankind, of course, truth will have conquered. Until then, however, the opposite is usually the case: “Victoria verifacit,” victory makes truth. Every historical era reflects the face of the most recent victor.

«Ogni cosa a questo mondo è innanzi tutto una questione morale e solo molto più tardi una questione politica.»

On May 10, 1933, National Socialist student groups marched “against the un-German spirit” and burned “un-German writings” in street actions designed to attract publicity. By now it seemed inevitable that the Franks would emigrate to Amsterdam. “When the Jews write in German, they lie,” the Nazis had proclaimed. The works of Thomas, Klaus, and Heinrich Mann, of Arnold and Stefan Zweig, of Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Werfel, not to mention the Communist writings of Marx and Engels and the books of Bertolt Brecht and many others, were tossed into the flames in many German cities to the accompaniment of shouted slogans; it was as though the demonstrators wished to burn the authors themselves at the stake. Otto Frank’s favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, whose poem “Lorelei” every schoolchild knew by heart, was declared a nonperson. In future textbooks, “Poet unknown” would replace the name of Heinrich Heine, a poet who had written a hundred years earlier, “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

humility in the face of the unattainable, as well as unease in the face of achievement, are both prerequisites for any mastery in life.

The bazaar bore him along. That deep surge which knows none of the ebb and flow, the hurry, of a crowd along a European pavement, which rolls on with an irresistible, even motion as time flows on into eternity. He might not have been in this God-forsaken provincial hole, Antakiya, but transported to Aleppo or Damascus, so inexhaustibly did the two opposing streams of the bazaar surge past each other. Turks in European dress, wearing the fez, with stand-up collars and walking-sticks, officials or merchants. Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, these too in European dress, but with different headgear. In and out among them, Kurds and Circassians in their tribal garb. Most displayed weapons. For the government, which in the case of Christian peoples viewed every pocketknife with mistrust, tolerated the latest infantry rifles in the hands of these restless mountaineers; it even supplied them. Arab peasants, in from the neighborhood. Also a few bedouins from the south, in long, many-folded cloaks, desert-hued, in picturesque tarbushes, the silken fringes of which hung over their shoulders. Women in charshaffes, the modest attire of female Moslems. But then, too, the unveiled, the emancipated, in frocks that left free silk-stockinged legs. Here and there, in this stream of human beings, a donkey, under a heavy load, the hopeless proletarian among beasts. To Gabriel it seemed always the same donkey which came stumbling past him in a coma, with the same ragged fellow tugging his bridle. But this whole world, men, women, Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, with trench-brown soldiers in its midst -- its goats, its donkeys -- was smelted together into an indescribable unity by its gait -- a long stride, slow and undulating, moving onwards irresistibly, to a goal not to be determined.

At first, roll calls were still taken. But, as death and sickness gained the upper hand, as more and more half-dead and corpses, especially children's corpses, were flung into the ditches, this keeping of lists seemed highly onerous, and the onbashi relinquished superfluous scribbling. Who cared to know that Sarkis, Astik, or Hapeth, that Anush, Vartuhi, or Koren, were rotting somewhere in the open? These saptiehs were not all brutes. It is even probable that most of them were good, plain, middling sort of people. But what can a saptieh do? He is under stringent orders to reach such and such a point with his whole convoy by such and such a scheduled hour. His heart may be in perfect sympathy with the screaming mother who tries to snatch her child out of a ditch, flings herself down on the road, and claws the earth. No use to talk to her. She's wasted minutes already, and it's still six miles to the next halt. A convoy held up. All the faces in it twisted with hate. A mad scream from a thousand throats. Why did not these crowds, weak as they were, hurl themselves on the saptieh and his mates, disarm them, and tear them into shreds? Perhaps the policemen were in constant terror of such assault, which would have finished them. And so -- one of them fires a shot. The rest whip out their swords to beat the defenceless cruelly with the blades. Thirty or forty men and women lie bleeding. And, with this blood, another emotion comes to life in the excited saptiehs -- their old itch for the women of the accursed race. In these helpless women you possess more than a human being -- in very truth you possess the God of your enemy. Afterwards, the saptiehs scarcely know how it all had happened.

La paura della morte si dileguò e le subentrò una meravigliosa indifferenza. Egli si distese come per dormire. Il cielo gemmato della notte d'agosto stava immobile sopra di lui. Fra i miliardi di stelle nessuna baluginava. Stefano era solo nel mondo e col mondo.

Did I hear somebody plaintively say the word “democracy?” Well, there really can’t be much argument about my hundred noble brides and fiancés. Moreover there can’t be much argument about the repeatedly stated fact that these people were not only living in a perfect democracy but in the most ideal form of communism. But for the very reason that democracy had become an absolute matter of course since untold millennia, it had ceased to exist. For democracy is one of those relativisms of life that ceases to exist as soon as it is realized. As long as the just demands for material and potential equality of every citizen of the globe had not been fulfilled, politicians and journalists could make a living by reiterating these just demands. But when, after endless battles, victories, and defeats, democracy finally triumphed, the much deeper inequalities than the material ones came into prominence: inequalities of beauty, of strength, of will, character, idiocy, cynicism, indolence, cleverness, talent, acumen—all those things for which God and nature can be held responsible, but no ruling party. I devoutly hope, however, that my report from the most remote future will not create a panic among our radical politicians and give them the deleterious notion that the only hope for their business lies in the secret soft-pedaling of material and potential inequality.

You probably recall even better than I that human superstition of that time made the happiness of nations dependent upon two economic systems that were both wrong. Both led to serfdom of the individual: one under the heel of the ruling classes, the other under the heel of the ruling masses. It was the most stupid either-or in world history, which always develops by virtue of such alternatives. How could there be peace in my old age as long as two systems existed side by side that hated as well as envied each other?

Every once in a while I get the queer notion that every human soul experiences everything, both outwardly and inwardly, that the world has to offer in the way of experiences. If that were not so, there would be no equality before God. The difference between souls does not lie in their ability or inability to have experiences but only in the degree of articulation with which they become conscious of these experiences. Even those who are simple enough to discount the more mysterious conditions of our soul as “extravagant fancies” are filled and permeated by them. For this reason the hope springs eternal that even the most ineffable inner experience will strike a responsive chord in someone who will exclaim in brotherly surprise: “I’ve had exactly the same experience.

Per esempio: «Nucleo ardente della terra... Asse celeste... Stormo di pleiadi... Fecondazione dei fiori...». Queste magnifiche parole sembravano elevassero l’anima di Krikór sopra se stessa, avvicinandola alla causa prima di tutte le cose. Egli le gettava nell’aria e quelle rimanevano sospese sopra di lui. Con esse costruiva una vòlta di cupola d’uno scintillante mosaico di scienza, nel centro della quale egli stava seduto col sorriso interiore di un sacerdote buddista.

El que tiene, obtiene.

Hoy te amo como te he amado siempre, y siempre te he amado como te amo hoy.

Gabriele non vedeva dinanzi a sé che un inizio, il crocicchio dove le vie si dividevano. Cinque passi più avanti tutto era nebbia e tenebra. Ma avviene in ogni vita così: prima della decisione nulla è più irreale che la meta.

Il cielo era così ardentemente nudo, che anche solo l’immagine di un fiocco di nube sarebbe sembrata l’invenzione di un cantastorie.

If I don’t succeed in staying awake I will lose myself. That’s not strong enough. If I fall asleep I shall lose myself in the wilderness of an unexampled and nameless lostness. That’s what I feel. That’s what I fear. That has nothing to do with real death. That’s death raised to an unheard of power. I’m familiar with real death. It’s simple and plain and solid, and death shouldn’t be pictured as a bony specter with a scythe but as an old peasant gazing speculatively at the sunset. But to give up one’s ego a second time because one falls into the trap of sleep, that’s too much, far too much.

No one of us has ever heard of a ‘Xenospasm’. The word is unknown, but the thing itself is a familiar human condition. Ordinary nostalgia in its double form, for example, yearning for a distant place and longing for a past time is a typical case of Xenospasm. This familiar sensation is much more complicated and is much more capable of intensification than one is inclined to imagine. The nostalgia of a retired old sea dog for his ship that is still seaworthy, is a fairly simple matter. The nostalgia of a refugee for his fatherland is much more complex, because he knows perfectly well that what he has lost changes with every passing hour and therefore becomes irretrievable. The impossibility of its real appeasement is the spice of every respectable case of nostalgia, just as the hopelessness of retrieving what is gone and lost is the pungent spice of exile.

And among the most highly developed of these was the order of spiders. Many a reader will no doubt be filled with loathing at the thought. That’s simply because he does not have the Astromental man’s attitude toward the spider but connects it with all sorts of horrid nursery tales and obsolete superstitions. For the cosmically expert sages in the Djebei, however, the spider was almost sacred, a hieratic animal. Why? In the first place, the spider is the physical image of the star in the animal kingdom; its body consists of a rounded core from which its long limbs radiate in all directions. The spider is unique among animals in respect to this form. In the second place, from its inwards the spider emits a white thread by means of which it fashions a net in which it hangs like a star in its network of rays. The spider thus symbolizes the creative process of the emission of “radiant energy, the scientific name for light. In the third place, suspended in the center of its radiating web, the spider calmly waits for its victims, flies, gnats, and moths. It never moves, for its prey is bound to fall within its grasp. Thus the spider symbolizes the star’s force of gravitation, the fundamental universal force called attraction,” that maintains the original creative impulse in motion and balance.

...only those minds can be convinced of the truth which are themselves capable of sharing in its lofty quality.

Ignominy has always been the younger sister of misfortune.

In the fawning soul of the mob everything is justified by the victorious employment of force. It transfigures treachery, desertion, murder, lying, and any kind of rascality, turning them into wholesome necessities which the servile people accept and swiftly forget as a child does a bitter medicine.

He [Jeremiah] felt all at one overwhelmed by the greatest gift that God can grant to a human being -- another human being. The world might rush to the abyss and nothing stay its course, but for him and his bride there was room enough on the edge of the precipice to build a house and live in it in peace. He could not prevent the downfall of Israel without being shattered himself...but he and Zenua could turn two hearts towards the Lord in their own house. amidst the general collapse they could continue to serve the Lord and listen with ears that would grow ever more attuned. Was this not enough for one of God's dreamers who had not been equipped with the toughness necessary for a fighter?

That which serves life is the business of women. [Jeremiah, to Queen Maacha]

Every incident in the history of the world, whether it was the flight of a gnat or a great battle, revealed by the very fact of its occurrence the mystery that was inherent in it.

The latter class [peasants] is always unaffected by the course of historic events. Like cats who are attached to a house and not to the people who dwell in it, the poorer type of peasant belongs less to the nation than to the soil. Therefore, however numerous they are, they never constitute a danger for a conqueror.

The deeds of our hearts too...are not without their progeny. [Jeremiah, to Ebed-melech]

aveva già raggiunto quel limite di età, al di là del quale l'uomo in divenire deve affermarsi non solo contro i propri umori, ma anche contro una gigantesca chimera del mondo, che gli fa sentire ad ogni minuto, soffocandolo, la nullità del suo lo appena desto.

In the face of death, unfaith is far unsurer of itself than faith.

Era l'orgoglio che infiamma sempre la nostra materia, quando lo spirito le ha dato una sconfitta.

In ogni età gli uomini si cospargono l’amaro cibo della vita con la droga di idee diverse, che lo rendono ancora più disgustoso.

Sangue e popolo! Siamo franchi! Non erano anche questi dei concetti vani? In ogni età gli uomini si cospargono l'amaro cibo della vita con la droga di idee diverse, che lo rendono ancora più disgustoso

I miei padri, che rivivono in me e che hanno indicibilmente sofferto, lo sentono. Tutta la mia sostanza vitale lo sente. No, tu non puoi comprendere, Giulietta. Chi non è mai stato odiato a cagione della sua razza non può comprendere

Giovanni Lepsius si è già fatto descrivere minutamente a Berlino Enver Pascià, tuttavia è molto sorpreso che il Marte turco, uno dei sette o nove grandi personaggi che decidono della morte e della vita del mondo, sia così piccolo di statura e così poco appariscente. Egli comprende subito i ritratti di Napoleone e di Federico. Eroi di un metro e sessanta di statura, geniali maniaci di grandezza, che hanno conquistato il loro successo a dispetto delle gambe troppo corte

Fra gli Armeni c'è senza dubbio una massa inquietante d'intelligenza. Lei è davvero amico di questo genere d'intelligenza, signor Lepsius? Io no! Noi Turchi ne possediamo poca di questa intelligenza. Ma in cambio siamo l'antica razza eroica, che è chiamata alla fondazione e al dominio del grande impero. Perciò supereremo tutti gli ostacoli (Enver Pascià)

Lepsius vede il viso glaciale dell'uomo che ha "superato ogni sentimentalità", il viso dell'uomo che sta di là dalla colpa e dai suoi rimorsi, vede il grazioso volto di precisione di una specie a lui sconosciuta ma che gli toglie il respiro, vede l'ingenuità inquietante, quasi perfino innocente, della perfetta empietà.

Mentre nei selamlík, nei caffè, nei bagni, nei luoghi di ritrovo della provincia, il mondo moderno (vale a dire tutti quelli che leggevano giornali, che possedevano un modesto tesoro di vocaboli stranieri, che invece della vecchia fantasmagoria turca detta "karegöz", avevano veduto a Smirne o a Stambul un paio di commedie francesi e avevano udito qualche volta il nome di Bismarck e di Sarah Bernhardt), mentre queste persone colte, questo mezzo ceto progredito si faceva incondizionatamente seguace della politica armena di Enver, ben altrimenti avveniva presso gli uomini semplici del popolo turco, contadini o basso ceto cittadino. Spesso il Müdir si stupiva nei suoi giri, quando in un villaggio dove aveva proclamato il bando vedeva radunarsi Turchi ed Armeni per piangere insieme. E si meravigliava, quando davanti a una casa armena si raccoglieva singhiozzando la famiglia dei vicini turchi e agli infelici, che irrigiditi e privi di lagrime uscivano dalla loro vecchia porta senza guardarsi attorno, non solo gridava un «Allàh vi sia misericordioso», ma dava anche provvigioni per il viaggio e regali vistosi, una capra, perfino un mulo. E il Müdir poté anche vedere questa famiglia di vicini accompagnare i dolenti per parecchie miglia. E poté vedere alcuni dei suoi propri compatriotti gettarglisi ai piedi, supplicandolo: «Lasciali con noi! Non hanno la vera fede, ma sono buoni. Sono nostri fratelli. Lasciali qui con noi!

Il grosso della schiera turca invece cercò di sfuggire per la via più breve al mortale groviglio delle rupi e si lanciò inciampando e cadendo verso la sella, inseguito dai guerrieri della montagna. Questi erano fuori di sé. Folli suoni gutturali ed urlanti uscivano dalla loro bocca, mentre davano la caccia ai Turchi. Anche Gabriele Bagradiàn aveva perduto da un pezzo la chiarezza del condottiero, scosso da una ebbrezza sconosciuta, da una delirante musica primordiale, che si era destata dal sonno millenario del suo sangue. Anche dal suo petto erompevano i suoni brevi, gutturali di un idioma selvaggio, che, sveglio, lo avrebbe riempito d'orrore. Il mondo diventava ancora cento volte più leggero di prima. Era un nulla, più inconsistente del tremito sottile di una libellula. Era una danza saltellante e rossastra e non faceva male al danzatore.

La realtà intorno a lui diventava così irreale, come lo è sempre nelle sue concrezioni più reali.

l'oppressione, l'orrore, i massacri erano terminati per sempre. Il mondo progredito non li avrebbe più tollerati.