Hofmannsthal Quotes

Reality lies in the greatest enchantment you have ever experienced.

To be modern means to like antique furniture - and youthful neurosis.

Words performed through music can express what language alone had exhausted

the activity of modern poets stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were building a pyramid, the monstruos residence of a dead King or an unborn God.

The soul is never wholly assembled, except in delight.

So las ich falsch in deinem Aug, dem tiefen? Kein heimlich Sehnen sah ich heiß dort funkeln? Es birgt zu deiner Seele keine Pforte Dein feuchter Blick? Die Wünsche, die dort schliefen, Wie stille Rosen in der Flut, der dunkeln, Sind, wie dein Plaudern: seellos... Worte, Worte?

He seeks life where it is to be found: in all that is most delicate, in the folds of things.

I wanted to show that the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. I sometimes thought I felt its breath, as though coming from behind a veil.

wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861. at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.

Was weiß denn ich vom Menschenleben? Bin freilich scheinbar drin gestanden, Aber ich hab es höchstens verstanden, Konnte mich nie darein verweben.

La escritura es un pequeño equívoco sin importancia, tan pequeño que nos hace casi mudos

Writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a regular at Café Central, once said, “Two attitudes seem modern in our time: analyzing life and escaping from it.” In the coffeehouse, you could do both simultaneously, and for only a few shillings. It was pure genius.

Ein sonderbar Ding ist die Zeit. Wenn man so hineinlebt, ist sie rein gar nichts. Aber dann auf einmal, dann spürt man nichts als sie.

Cada prazer da vida se funda no retorno regular das coisas externas. A alternância do dia e da noite, das estações, das flores e dos frutos, e cada coisa que nos vem ao encontro periodicamente, porque nós podemos e devemos apreciá-las, estes são os verdadeiros estímulos da vida terrena. Quanto mais abertos estamos a tais fruições, tanto mais nos sentimos felizes' Goethe

Hugo Hofmann von Hofmannsthal, tenente, prima in servizio a Pisino d’Istria, poi presso il ministero della Guerra, celebra l’Austria a Vienna, a Berlino, a Praga, nei Paesi occupati o neutrali, a Varsavia e a Bruxelles, a Zurigo, ad Oslo e a Stoccolma, dove va in missione straordinaria, ambasciatore di un’antica patria della musica e della poesia. Ma si domanda con un soprassalto, la notte, quante volte si domanda se ogni suo discorso non sia solo la commemorazione di un defunto. Poiché questa domanda lo accompagna da anni, prima ancora della guerra: «Verso quali decenni sono avviati i nostri figli, a quale avvenire, in questa Austria, figliastra della storia, così strana e diversa, così sola? La nostra vecchia Austria è assediata da torbidi presagi e ombre di morte».

Darwin and Nietzsche were the common spiritual and intellectual source for the mean-spirited and bellicose ideological assault on progress, liberalism, and democracy that fired the late-nineteenth-century campaign to preserve or rejuvenate the traditional order. Presensitized for this retreat from modernity, prominent fin-de-siècle aesthetes, engages literati, polemical publicists, academic sociologists, and last but not least, conservative and reactionary politicians became both consumers and disseminators of the untried action-ideas. Oscar Wilde and Stefan George were perhaps most representative of the aristocratizing aesthetes whose rush into dandyism or retreat into cultural monasticism was part of the outburst against bourgeois philistinism and social levelling. Their yearning for a return to an aristocratic past and their aversion to the invasive democracy of their day were shared by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose nostalgia for the presumably superior sensibilities of a bygone cultivated society was part of their claim to privileged social space and position in the present. Although they were all of burgher or bourgeois descent, they extolled ultra-patrician values and poses, thereby reflecting and advancing the rediscovery and reaffirmation of the merits and necessities of elitism. Theirs was not simply an aesthetic and unpolitical posture precisely because they knowingly contributed to the exaltation of societal hierarchy at a time when this exaltation was being used to do battle against both liberty and equality. At any rate, they may be said to have condoned this partisan attack by not explicitly distancing themselves from it. Maurice Barrès, Paul Bourget, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were not nearly so self-effacing. They were not only conspicuous and active militants of antidemocratic elitism, but they meant their literary works to convert the reader to their strident persuasion. Their polemical statements and their novels promoted the cult of the superior self and nation, in which the Church performed the holy sacraments. Barrès, Bourget, and D'Annunzio were purposeful practitioners of the irruptive politics of nostalgia that called for the restoration of enlightened absolutism, hierarchical society. and elite culture in the energizing fires of war.

Fin de siècle Vienna was a melting pot that had produced Gustav Mahler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Sigmund Freud. But when the empire’s narrower national identities—Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs, and Austro-Germans—asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance.

A profunda ignorância é o que inspira o tom dogmático". La Bruyère

Cultural conservatism originated in the experience of a way of life that was under threat or disappearing. The memory of that way of life could be preserved, and its spiritual meaning enshrined in works of art. But the way of life itself could not be so easily protected. Should we then appeal to the state to subsidise a dying lifestyle, establishing wildlife parks like those in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which the agrarian way of life stumbles on, unconscious of the world that lies beyond its sensitively policed perimeter? Or should we devote ourselves, instead, to the idea of the thing that we are bound to lose, keeping it alive in art, as did Strauss and von Hofmannsthal in perpetuating the sugar-coated seductiveness of the aristocratic life in Der Rosenkavalier, or D. H. Lawrence in celebrating the close-knit cohesion of the old mining communities in Sons and Lovers? But then, to whom will such works of art be addressed? Necessarily, to those who have become conscious of the old way of life as something lost, something that can be preserved only in this aesthetic form. For its practitioners it would have meant nothing to preserve their way of life as an idea, rather than as the reality of their being in the world. To put it more severely: culture becomes an object of conservation only when it has already been lost.

Nothing becomes reality in the political life of a nation that was not present in its literature as spirit.

What alone mattered was that the boy cultivate his faculties for the optimum enjoyment of refined leisure. The gifted son was consequently reared in a virtual hothouse for the development of aesthetic talent.* Small wonder that the adolescent Hofmannsthal became a young Narcissus, “early ripened and tender and sad.”8 Quickly absorbing the fashionable poetic and plastic culture of all Europe, his language glowed darkly with purple and gold, shimmered with world-weary mother-of-pearl.

What he said of Friedrich Hebbel’s poetry is true of his own, that it “penetrates us in such a way that the most secret … inner depths stir in us and the actually demonic, the natural in us, sounds in dark and intoxicating sympathetic vibration.”10 With all its danger, the instinctual element in man, “the natural in us,” provided the power whereby one could escape from the prison of aestheticism, from the paralysis of narcissistic sensibility. Engagement in life, Hofmannsthal felt, demands the capacity to resolve, to will. This capacity implies commitment to the irrational, in which alone resolution and will are grounded. Thus affirmation of the instinctual reopened for the aesthete the door to the life of action and society. How did Hofmannsthal see the great world which he now entered? Modern society and culture seemed to him, as to Schnitzler, hopelessly pluralistic, lacking in cohesion or direction. “… [T]he nature of our epoch,” he wrote in 1905, “is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the moving, the slipping, the sliding], and is aware that what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende”11 This new perception of reality undermined the very efficacy of reason for Hofmannsthal. “Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts,” says one of his characters, “and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.”12 Hofmannsthal saw it as the trial of the noblest natures to take into themselves “a wholly irrational mass of the non-homogeneous,

Hofmannsthal once observed that the activity of modern poets “stands under the decree of necessity, as though they were all building on a pyramid, the monstrous residence of a dead king or an unborn god.

Merk dies allein: nicht eine einzige Stunde kommt zweimal im Leben, Nicht ein Wort, nicht eines Blickes Ungreifbares Nichts ist je Ungeschehn zu machen, was Du getan hast, mußt du tragen, So das Lächeln wie den Mord!

Wir können warten. Wissen macht frei.” (We can wait. Knowledge liberates.) In these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861.29 At the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: “Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.

Um homem que morre aos trinta e cinco anos é em cada momento da sua vida um homem que morrerá aos trinta e cinco anos. A isso Goethe chamava 'enteléquia

As circunstâncias têm menos poder de nos fazer felizes ou infelizes do que se acredita; mas a antecipação das circunstâncias futuras na fantasia têm um poder imenso

As situações são simbólicas; é uma fraqueza dos homens de hoje tratá-las analiticamente e dissolver com isso sua magia

É uma a faculdade que mais importa desenvolver nas crianças: a de sentir que o divino se manifesta em nossa imediata vizinhança. Porém, muitas coisas que fazemos e deixamos fazer tendem a distruir tal faculdade, endurecendo o coração

Apenas naquilo que o homem faz, segue fazendo, naquilo em que persevera, ele mostra caráter.

Quem envelhece reconhece que permanecemos constantemente em culpa, através de todas as circunstâncias e combinações da vida; mas em cada homem habita também a sua sorte de inocência; e é esta que o sustenta, sem que ele mesmo saiba como

Il n'y a rien de coupable. L'instant n'est pas coupable, c'est seulement de vouloir le retenir qui n'est pas permis. Seul le fait de se cramponner à ce qui ne se laisse pas retenir... (89)

Mano mėgiamiausi poetai? Karalius Dovydas, Karalius Saliamonas, Ekleziastas; Lamartine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Valéry, Marie Noël, Jouve; Angelus Silesius, Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Traki, Langgasser; Leopardi, Campana, Montale; San Juan de la Cruz, Garcia Lorca, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats; Donelaitis, Maironis, Putinas, Aistis (pirmos 4 knygos). Bet mano preferencijos nuolat kinta Mano mėgiamiausi tapytojai? Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Tiziano, Piero di Cosimo, Magnasco; Claude Lorrain, Georges de la Tour, Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Manet, Renoir, Soutine, Duffy, Chagall, Sérafine; Brueghel (Senasis), Memling, Hobbema, Vermeer; Dürer, Lucas Cranach (Senasis), Kokoschka; Gainsborough, Palmer; El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Dali; Galdikas, Samuolis, Vizgirda, Valeška, Gudaitis.

In meines Großpapa's Geburtshaus mein unteres linkes Zahnerl wurde wakelig und empfahl sich am nächsten Morgen, verdrängt vom Nachfolger. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (6) an die Eltern

Vergeben Sie mir diese Schilderung, aber denken Sie nicht, daß es Mitleid war, was mich erfüllte. [...] Es war viel mehr und viel weniger als Mitleid: ein ungeheures Anteilnehmen, ein Hinüberfließen in jene Geschöpfe oder ein Fühlen, daß ein Fluidum des Lebens und Todes, des Traumes und Wachens für einen Augenblick in sie hinübergeflossen ist [...].