Quotes from Hermann Broch

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

in the intoxication of falling, man was prone to believe himself propelled upward.

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.

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se , forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.

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

the irrational invalidates any meaning attached to it.

The man who is thus outside the confines of every value-combination, and has become the exclusive representative of an individual value, is metaphysically an outcast, for his autonomy presupposes the resolution and disintegration of all system into its individual elements; such a man is liberated from values and from style, and can be influenced only by the irrational.

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.

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.

A gift weighed down with obligations is scarcely a gift.

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.

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.

A man who sacrifices himself must be a decent chap.

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.

it is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the rôle of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

Do thyself no harm! for we are all here!

that in the chain of memory into which we are forged the first links should be the strongest, as if they, just they, were the most real reality.