Friedrich Holderlin Quotes
Friedrich Holderlin shares lyrical, contemplative thoughts on nature, love, and risk, with a poetic, gentle voice.
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You seek life, and a godly fire Gushes and gleams for you out of the earth, As, with shuddering long, you Hurl yourself down to the flames of the Etna. So by a queen's wanton whim Peals were dissolved in wine- heed her not! What folly, poet, to cast your riches Into that bright and bubbling cup! Yet still are you holy to me, as the might of the earth That bore you away, audaciously perishing! And I would follow the hero into the depths Did love not hold me.
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The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.
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We were eager to have done and trusted to luck.
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Now we were standing close to the summit's rim, gazing out into the endless East.
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What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love.
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What is the wisdom of a book compared with the wisdom of an angel?
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I call on Fate to give me back my soul.
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This name is fake. I was never called Holderlin, but Scardanelli!
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Like a poet man lives.
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What has always made a Hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his Heaven.
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I was raised by the song Of the murmuring grove And loving I learned Among Flowers.
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I am mortal, born to love and to suffer.
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In life learn art, in the artwork learn life. If you see the one correctly you see the other also.
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Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the maniaWhich insists there is only the One, one country, one truth, and one way.
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“You have a head and a heart? Reveal only one of them, I say; If you reveal both at once, doubly they'll damn you, for both.”
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“I grew up in the arms of the gods.”
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“What love and spirit give cannot be extorted. The state has always been made a hell by man's wanting to make it his heaven. The state is nothing but the coarse husk around the seed of life, the wall around the human fruits and flowers. Yet what good is a wall when the soil of our garden is parched? ... O inspiration, you will bring us the springtime of peoples again. The state cannot command your presence, but if it does not obstruct you, you will come.”
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“The God, when he draws near, will the heart stand fast. But, oh my, shame! when of My shame! And let me say at once That I approached to see the Heavenly, And they cast me down, deep down Below the living, into the dark cast down The false priest that I am, to sing, For those who have ears to hear, the warning song. There”
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“These fruits are ripe, dipped in fire, Cooked and tested here on earth.”
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“Thus the sons of earth now drink in The fire of heaven without danger. And it is our duty, poets, to stand Bare-headed under the storms of God, Grasping with our own hand The Father's beam itself, And to offer the gift of heaven, Wrapped in song, to the people. From “As On a Holiday” (“Wie Wenn am Feiertage”)”
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“Near and hard to grasp Is the God. But where danger is Deliverance also grows”
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“For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.”
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“Good Advice You’ve a head and a heart? Reveal only one of them, I say; If you reveal both at once, doubly they’ll damn you, for both.”
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“To the Parcae" A single summer grant me, great powers, and a single autumn for fully ripened song that, sated with the sweetness of my playing, my heart may more willingly die. The soul that, living, did not attain its divine right cannot repose in the nether world. But once what I am bent on, what is holy, my poetry, is accomplished: Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows’ world! I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not accompany me down there. Once I lived like the gods, and more is not needed.”
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“The state is the coarse husk around the seed of life, and nothing more. It is the wall around the garden of human fruits and flowers.”
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“Why do you like me more when I was prouder and wilder, more full of words, yet emptier?”
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“I can think of no people more fragmented... Craftsmen you see, but no humans, thinkers, but no humans, priests, but no humans, lords and servants, boys and established peoples but no humans--is this not like a battlefield, where hands and arms and all limbs lie chaotically in pieces, while the spilled blood of life runs into the sand?”