Hermann Broch quotes

Hermann Broch was an influential Austrian writer and essayist, best known for his modernist novels. His works, including "The Sleepwalkers" and "The Death of Virgil," are celebrated for their philosophical depth and innovative narrative style. He explored themes of social change, ethics, and the crisis of values in twentieth-century Europe. Here are 18 of his quotes:

The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.

Hermann Broch

No one's death comes to pass without making some impression, and those close to the deceased inherit part of the liberated soul and become richer in their humanness.

Hermann Broch

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.

Hermann Broch

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism.

Hermann Broch

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.

Hermann Broch

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

Hermann Broch

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.

Hermann Broch

The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

Hermann Broch

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them.

Hermann Broch

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.

Hermann Broch

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Hermann Broch

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

Hermann Broch

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.

Hermann Broch

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

Hermann Broch

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical.

Hermann Broch

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

Hermann Broch