Quotes About Hölderlin

German endurance knows no limits — even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hölderlin forty.

When I spoke of beauty, I was thinking of Rilke's notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin's idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.

Nichts lässt die Erde mit größerer Sicherheit zur Hölle werden, als der Versuch des Menschen, sie seinem Himmel zu machen.

Fundamental in Hölderlin's scheme is the idea that poesy is indispensable to the world; nay, more, that it is not merely a creation within the cosmos, but itself creates the cosmos.

To be alone, and without gods, this—this it is, is Death," Hölderlin puts into Empedocles's mouth in the play and maybe in this we can trace the first whisper of the gigantic tragedy that Nietzsche would articulate in the death of God.

But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from the Western Land (cf. pl. XIX), was robbed of his treasure by the demon-serpent, so Hölderlin's poem dies away in a painful lament, which tells us that his descent to the shadows will be followed by no resurrection in this world:

In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minerva as the patron spirit of philosophers, and the Miskatonic must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of choice. Since Heidegger's treatment of Hölderlin resulted mostly in pious, dreary readings, philosophy needs a new literary hero."44

On April 20, 1970, the poet Paul Celan left his home in Paris, walked to a bridge over the River Seine, and jumped to his death. He left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk, with the following words underlined: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart." The sentence does not end there. Celan chose not to underline the rest: "but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.