Book detail: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
Hermann Broch's Minima Moralia is a collection of philosophical essays that delve into the intricacies of human existence and the challenges of contemporary life. The essays, written in German and translated into English, are characterized by their introspective nature and their exploration of the author's personal experiences. Broch's work is known for its depth of thought and its ability to connect philosophical ideas with everyday life.
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“Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“He who matures early lives in anticipation.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Intelligence is a moral category.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“There is no love that is not an echo.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
“He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof.”
Source: Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life